“The first time I knew about the Climate Museum, I was just walking in SoHo; I saw the window and I went in and loved it,” said Salume, who recently graduated from Fordham College at Lincoln Center. “I thought, ‘Wow, it would be great to work at an organization like this, that combines art and climate action.’ It was right up my alley with my environmental studies and humanitarian studies majors.”

John van Buren, Salume’s major advisor and director of the environmental studies program, sent an email a few weeks later with internship opportunities that included one at the museum.

Salume said she “applied immediately.” She started in January as a development intern, working with companies to secure donations.

“Majo [her nickname]has been an incredible force,” said Saskia Randle, a design and curatorial associate at the museum—the first of its kind in the U.S. “As the Climate Museum looks to expand our impact, her research and organizational skills have been essential. Her sincere and enthusiastic work with visitors, particularly younger students, has reinforced our mission to offer opportunities for climate awareness and action to all.” 

Salume said that she became interested in sustainability at a summer camp when she was younger. At Fordham, courses, such as Art Design and Politics, have helped her connect art with environmental action. She also explored those two themes through another internship with the Chelsea Music Festival, which had an environmentally-focused theme last year.

Through working at the museum, Salume said that she saw how art helps younger people connect with complicated topics like climate change. 

“We have this mural, and I think it’s so visually appealing,” she said. “It has so much color, and it does a great job at envisioning a sustainable future. There is a section where it represents where we are now, which is a lot of protests …. And at the end of the mural, you can see a very green, very colorful, very lively world—the kids really resonate with that more than just plain facts.”

Salume was surprised to find she liked the fundraising aspect of her internships. 

“In my past two internships, I’ve been the development intern, which became an unexpected interest of mine,” she said. “But I’m doing my thesis on fast fashion, and the environmental and humanitarian impacts of that, and that has really pushed me to that sector as well.”

Published in the journal Nature, “Unequal Climate Impacts on Global Values of Natural Capital” reveals a staggering forecast: By the year 2100, 90% of climate change’s impact on vital ecosystems, including woodlands, grasslands, and other sources of economic benefits, will be shouldered by the poorest 50% of regions worldwide. These regions, Conte said, are more reliant on this “natural capital.”

“Humanity derives a lot of value from natural capital, and this value has been ignored in most models of optimal climate emissions,” said Conte, an associate professor of economics at Fordham who played a pivotal role as one of the co-authors of the research. The study, funded by a $750,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, was a collaborative effort with researchers from the University of California, Davis.

The implications of the findings extend beyond the scientific realm into global policymaking. “We’re allowing too many emissions, and we need to pay more attention to these impacts,” Conte emphasized, highlighting the urgent need to refine the framework used to determine acceptable greenhouse gas emissions.

To comprehend the impacts of greenhouse gasses on human well-being and national economies, Conte and his co-authors employed a sophisticated approach, using global vegetation models, climate models, and World Bank estimates. The study leveraged the World Bank’s wealth accounts to evaluate non-market ecosystem benefits, offering a standardized metric for comparison. The modeling allows more precise predictions.

“The World Bank’s values, although conservative in the scope of benefits included, provide a consistent approach to understanding the value of natural capital at the national level,” Conte said. “Our research takes this a step further by disaggregating a country’s total value of natural capital and distributing it across different ecosystems within its borders.”

Beyond the scientific discoveries, the research raises ethical and policy considerations of global significance. Conte highlighted the responsibility of wealthier nations to recognize and address the disproportionate impact of climate change on less affluent regions, emphasizing that climate change is not merely an environmental concern but a profound economic and social issue.

“Many of the low and middle-income nations located in the tropics are not responsible for climate change. Although they are not major emitters, they are bearing the burden of decisions that have been made by high-income nations,” Conte said.

A U.N. communications officer and analyst helps farmers adapt to climate change

Chicago native Ian Muir Smith got his first meaningful exposure to the effects of climate change in 2021, as a Fordham College at Lincoln Center student majoring in international studies.

He earned a summer research grant to travel to Kenya, where he spent three months studying how farmers are using technology to mobilize resources and “guide their own development,” he says. He lived in an adobe hut with no running water and watched his hosts’ water reserves run out because of a drought.

“That was the context of everything that was happening in people’s lives,” he says.

Toward a More Just Model of Agricultural Development

The farmers Smith lived with in Kenya are among nearly 4.5 billion people who rely on food systems for their livelihood, according to the United Nations’ Department of Economic and Social Affairs. It’s a statistic that lies at the heart of Smith’s work as a consultant for the U.N.’s International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and as a research fellow for the nonprofit Food Tank.

“In order for countries to ‘develop,’ agriculture is the first thing that has to change,” Smith says, noting that agriculture is also responsible for one third of global greenhouse gasses contributing to climate change. “And whether they get to determine how to do it, or whether other countries and companies are determining how they do it, is up in the air. I want to make agriculture and agricultural development more just and more democratic.”

As a communications and knowledge management consultant with IFAD, which is an international financial institution and specialized United Nations agency, Smith looks over data from the portfolio of grants that the agency sends to research institutions to help smallholder farmers adapt to climate change. He then writes reports and blog posts on the effects those grants had. These are made available in the agency’s “knowledge base,” a database that is publicly available and sent to partners and donors.

Working to Ensure That Climate Debt Gets Paid

By the time his final semester rolled around, he had the opportunity to take a communications internship with the United Nations in Rome, where IFAD is headquartered, beginning his professional relationship with the agency and furthering his passion for steering developmental resources to those most impacted by industrialization and climate change.

“The reason that I want to do what I want to do,” he explains, “is that I truly believe the U.S. and Europe owe a debt to the billions of people who are suffering because of the climate crisis and neo-imperialism. And I want to spend my life making sure that debt is paid.”

Since graduating, Smith has helped organize several youth climate actions and is currently working to start a microfinancing social enterprise to invest in women’s communal banking groups in Kenya. And while food system and climate issues can often result in a sort of “doom and gloom” feeling, Smith says that his work has made him feel more optimistic about meeting the challenge.

“Every day I learn about new organizations doing new work that is changing people’s lives,” he says. “There are millions and millions of people who are working on food systems and are determined to make the world better.”

Read more “20 in Their 20s” profiles.

With her latest project, conceptual artist and photographer Carolyn Monastra has been traveling to places where birds are in danger of habitat loss. She hopes to spur viewers to take action around climate change.

With a passing glance, the Canada jay overlooking Peyto Lake in the Rocky Mountains of Alberta, Canada, appears to be completely real—but if you hold your gaze, an unnatural outline becomes clearer, and you realize you’re looking at a facsimile. The photo below is part of a project called The Divergence of Birds, in which artist Carolyn Monastra, FCRH ’88, photographs paper cutouts of birds in their native habitats—a nod to a future in which the real birds may be forced out of those current homes.

Monastra said that the idea for the project came out of reading a 2014 National Audubon Society climate report that found that 314 North American bird species will lose more than half of their climatic range by 2080—a number that increased to 389 species in a 2019 report.

Monastra, who also teaches photography at Nassau Community College, plans to photograph cutouts of each of those 389 birds for the project. Where she cannot travel to the actual habitats to shoot photos, she said, she will recreate the environment, and she’ll gradually document all the photos on the project website, along with some behind-the-scenes photos and videos of her process.

“I want people to understand that they’re cutouts from the time they come to it,” she said, “using that as a way to get them to pay attention to the birds in my photographs, see what’s happening to them, and then go outside and get engaged.”

Committing to Photography and Finding Inspiration

In the 1980s, Monastra majored in English at Fordham College at Rose Hill, where she was a member of the honors program, but she also took several photography classes at the Lincoln Center campus. One of her photography professors, Joseph Lawton, saw her talent behind the camera and encouraged her to pursue an M.F.A. after she graduated in 1988.

After several postgraduation years serving in the Jesuit Volunteer Corps in Santa Monica, California, and exploring a career in social work, Monastra followed Lawton’s advice. She enrolled in the M.F.A. program in photography at Yale Universityto “finally commit to being a photographer,” she said.

Once she had her master’s, she began teaching, and she has held several high school and college jobs, including a year as a photography instructor at Fordham. She has been teaching full time at Nassau Community College since 2005, all the while pursuing her own projects outside the classroom, like lovely, dark and deep, in which she turned to “the fragmentary space of dreams and my experiences with the environment to discover and create mystery in the natural world,” and The Witness Tree, which immediately preceded The Divergence of Birds and also dealt with climate change, in that case through a series of landscape images showing the effects of climate disasters.

Monastra first saw the Audubon Climate Report while working on The Witness Tree, and the wheels for a bird-centered project began turning. She thought about her own history with the animals, and she began buying books for research—books that would ultimately provide a more material kind of inspiration.

“I was really interested in how birds build their nests,” she said. “I’d never really been a birder until I started this project, but my mom always had bird feeders, so we always had birds around. I was buying all these secondhand bird books to learn about birds building their nests, and then I just started cutting them out.”

She also was reading Philip K. Dick’s science fiction novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? around that time, and she said that the dystopian world of the book, in which electric versions of animals are so realistic that no one can tell the difference between them and the real thing, resonated with her.

“That little part also made me think about this idea of facsimile and simulacra, and how sometimes we’re fooled by that. And in a future warming world, if we don’t protect what we have, that’s all we’ll have left.”

An Artist’s Responsibility

In addition to updating the project website on a rolling basis, Monastra has been thinking about ways to bring the project to a wider audience in various settings. In October, she had a residency at NYC Audubon’s environmental center on Governors Island, where she used the images for banners she could string throughout the center.

And much like a Postcards to Politicians project she created for The Witness Tree, in which she encouraged people to handmake postcards from her collaged images and send them to politicians to push for climate action, she would like to engage communities with The Divergence of Birds directly.

“Adopt a Bird will be something similar, using recycled materials,” she said of her next planned public project. “I’ll have all the pictures of the birds in people’s area, wherever it happens to be. There will be a pledge they’ll make, as they adopt that bird, to promote climate change legislation.”

Beyond hands-on, collaborative art, she hopes that the photos will not only get viewers interested in birds but also spur them to take action around climate change in other ways. That is, she feels, one of her guiding forces as an artist.

“I think artists do have a responsibility to use their gift to talk about these issues,” she said. “Whether it’s climate change or social justice or anything else, I think we have the ability to translate numbers and statistics into something that can move people.”

Increasing extreme weather conditions like record-high temperatures and devastating droughts are undoubtedly the result of “unchecked human intervention on nature,” Pope Francis declared in a letter published today expanding on his 2015 Laudato Si’ encyclical.

Since that publication, he said, “I have realized that our responses have not been adequate, while the world in which we live is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point.”

Pope Francis called out the United States, specifically, in this new apostolic exhortation, titled Laudate Deum, issued on the first day of the Synod on Synodality.

“If we consider that emissions per individual in the United States are about two times greater than those of individuals living in China, and about seven times greater than the average of the poorest countries, we can state that a broad change in the irresponsible lifestyle connected with the Western model would have a significant long-term impact,” he said. 

“The ethical decadence of real power is disguised thanks to marketing and false information, useful tools in the hands of those with greater resources to employ them to shape public opinion,” he wrote.

Pope Francis’s Specificity Is ‘Not Accidental’

Christiana Zenner, an associate professor of theology, science, and ethics at Fordham, said, “This is a document that doubles down morally on the centrality of climate crises and the immediate responsibility of ‘all people of good will’ to address them.” 

“Pope Francis first dismantles climate denialism by careful arguments, data, precision of terms, and strategic citation of the climate-recidivistic U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops,” Zenner said. “And the penultimate paragraph of the exhortation likewise identifies the ways that U.S.-based climate exceptionalism is problematic. This is as specific about national responsibilities as a pope ever gets, and it is definitely not accidental here.”

The publication coincides with the upcoming U.N. climate change conference that will convene in Dubai in November, much like the release of the 2015 encyclical ahead of the Paris climate conference. The pontiff laments that the Paris Agreement has been poorly implemented, lacking effective tools to force compliance. 

“International negotiations cannot make significant progress due to positions taken by countries which place their national interests above the global common good,” he wrote.

Never Mind the Bedroom, ‘the Entire House Will Burn Down’

David Gibson, director of Fordham’s Center on Religion and Culture, said the new publication shifts the controversy among American Catholics from sex to climate change—which has the potential to be even more contentious. 

“The focus and controversy in the church that Pope Francis leads has lately been directed toward issues of sex and sexuality and his efforts to make Catholicism more inclusive. The irony is that this papal exhortation will likely be even more controversial for Americans than any issue of sexuality because it demands fundamental changes in our consumerist lifestyles.”

Gibson added, “Many American Catholics want the church to focus on what people do in the bedroom. Pope Francis is saying the entire house will burn down if we don’t change our behavior in every other aspect of our lives.”

“Nowhere is it more critical than here in the Bronx,” said Ritchie Torres, the U.S. representative for New York’s 15th congressional district that covers most of the South Bronx, an area with notorious levels of air pollution and high asthma rates. “For me, it’s not only about environmental protection. It’s about public health.”

The forum, which was sponsored by Fordham’s Center for Community Engaged Learning, took place on June 9—coincidentally, just several days after New York City recorded its worst air quality on record. 

“The extreme air pollution that we have seen firsthand here in the Bronx is a glimpse of what can happen if we do nothing or do too little to combat climate change,” said Representative Torres. “This is not speculation. This is reality.”

The Inflation Reduction Act, a new climate and tax law signed by President Joseph Biden last year, is designed to combat climate change, in part by providing monetary incentives to individuals and businesses. This is relevant to the Bronx and its health care sector, which has the power to play a big role in decarbonizing the borough, said Representative Torres. 

“The road to decarbonizing America is going to run through the health care sector because you are the largest employers in the Bronx and elsewhere in the country,” he said, addressing about 20 Bronx health care leaders at the forum. “Twenty-five percent of the Bronx economy is health care; 10% of greenhouse gas emissions is coming from the health care sector.”

Using a PowerPoint presentation, members of the federal Office of Climate Change and Health Equity explained how they are assembling the most relevant parts of the Inflation Reduction Act for the health sector in an online quickfinder, where they can learn more about and take advantage of tax incentives, direct pay provisions, and grants. 

Opal Dunstan, chief operating officer of VIP Community Services, a community health center in the Bronx, said the forum was helpful, but voiced caution. 

“At least we know that the federal government sees the correlation between what’s happening outside and how it impacts the organizations that we operate, but in order to do the things we need to do to address [climate change], we need to have money. … We’re in old buildings and we need to upgrade, but these things have costs,” said Dunstan, adding that she will examine the quickfinder and research tax incentives and grants that could benefit her community center. “It was good information, and hopefully it will help us.” 

Fordham marked the launch of a seven-year transformative climate change plan with an April 19 event at the Rose Hill campus that brought students, activists, government officials, and neighborhood leaders together on the Rose Hill campus.

The University also welcomed back to campus Elizabeth Yeampierre, FCRH ‘80, who laid out the challenges of achieving climate justice in a keynote address

“In the climate justice movement where I come from, we say that transition is inevitable, but justice is not,” she said.

Yeampierre, an attorney who co-chairs the national Climate Justice Alliance and is the executive director of the Brooklyn-based Latino community organization UPROSE, challenged institutions such as Fordham to shake off conventional thinking.

“Climate change is not conventional. It is unpredictable, it is violent, and it is here,” she said.

“We really need people who are thinking in a way that is unconventional and honors Mother Earth, and are building just relationships and are engaged in self-transformation, so that we are able to hold this work, which is literally the human rights of our day.”

In a wide-ranging conversation with Julie Gafney, Ph.D., director of the Center for Community Engaged Learning (CCEL), on the terrace of the Walsh Family Library, Yeampierre laid out a case for a bottom-up strategy for dealing with climate change.

“We need to be able to listen to the people on the ground. The educated person knows how to take the formal education that they have, break it down, and make it accessible so that people on the ground can run with it,” she said.

As an example, she pointed to an app that UPROSE created for the 90 auto salvage yards in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, to use to access best practices for becoming climate adaptable. It includes information on chemicals that are vulnerable to extreme heat, which is expected to become a bigger problem in the future.

“Environmentalists would like to shut them down, but these are working-class people in our community, and we don’t throw away our people,” she said.

Ryan Chen, a junior environmental science major at Fordham College at Lincoln Center and a student advocacy fellow, was one of a dozen members of the audience who engaged with Yeampierre in a Q&A session. He plans to apply the lessons from her talk to his work with Sunrise Movement NYC.

“Sunrise NYC is developing local campaigns to fight for a new green deal that also addresses the needs of people in New York City,” he said.

“What Elizabeth told me is, it’s more important to support the work of other organizations that are already doing. That’s something that I really want to bring to the conversation, to make sure that we don’t co-opt other people’s work.”

The theme of grassroots organization suffused the day’s event, which was organized by CCEL. Tents arrayed on the lawn in front of the library featured representatives from groups such as the Bronx River Alliance, Cafeteria Culture, and Friends of Pelham Bay Park, and speakers included representatives from Loving the Bronx and the New York City Parks.

A panel discussion, “Global Migration, Climate Displacement, and Racial Justice,” featured Annetta Seecharran, GSAS ’94, executive director of Chhaya CDC, an advocacy group that serves South Asian and Indo-Carribbean communities, and Andrew Rasmussen, Ph.D., professor of psychology and head of the Culture, Migration, and Community Research Group at Fordham.

Seecharran, a graduate of Fordham’s International Political and Economic Development (IPED) program, noted that her organization’s clients don’t often bring up climate change as a concern, but they do bring up health and housing problems that are exacerbated by it.

Hurricane Ida, which caused extensive flooding in New York City in 2021, and killed 11 people trapped in basement apartments, was a wake-up call that housing and weather issues can collide, even inland.

“My organization is known for working on tenant and homeowner issues. We’re not known as an environmental organization, but we can’t think of our work as separate from the environmental,” she said.

Rasmussen said community organizations need to organize and document environmental issues that are displacing them, and demand help from local officials.

“Those of you who know your Frederick Douglass remember that power concedes nothing without demand. It never has, it never will. Community organizations are the key to making those demands.”

“You can hear the symphony and cacophony of sound, as if you could and should be able to reach out and touch the creatures making those sounds. And yet it’s extremely difficult to see the creatures that are making those noises. You have to be patient, still, quiet, and keep looking,” he says. “Perhaps akin to God. You must have faith. You may witness the evidence of God in your life, yet you often must calm your mind, heart, and soul to feel and truly embrace that presence in your life.”

In the past 25 years, Davidson, a 1994 Fordham College at Rose Hill graduate and longtime member of the Fordham President’s Council, has traveled to 50 countries—in part through his work as a consultant, keynote speaker, and managing director at firms including Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, and most recently JPMorgan Chase, where he was responsible for leading global corporate workplace operations, business transformation programs, and people strategies.

He’s also a wildlife photographer with a deep, abiding interest in conservation issues. Last summer, he traveled from New York to Southeast Asia to document the biodiversity of places—on Borneo, Komodo, and Sulawesi—that are increasingly threatened by habitat loss.

“Like so many people around the world, I was reading the headlines … about what was happening to the environment, to the rainforest, and to the orangutans,” he says in Through the Looking Glass, a documentary film he wrote and directed in September.

Borneo’s forests—home to more than 15,000 known species of flowering plants, 3,000 species of trees, 200 species of terrestrial mammals, and 400 species of birds—are thought to be 130 million years old. That’s twice the estimated age of the Amazon, Davidson notes, and yet “in the span of only 50 to 100 years,” those forests have been reduced by more than 50%, critically endangering orangutans, threatening Bornean elephants, and leaving other species vulnerable to extinction.

“One of the primary drivers for this deforestation is the palm oil industry,” he says. “Rainforests are clear-cut, all the layers of biodiversity are removed, and palm oil trees are planted. It provides a whole host of products that we like to use, we like to eat,” from shampoo and cosmetics to cookies and ice cream.

By making the documentary—which features photos, video vignettes, and forest sounds recorded on location—Davidson has added his voice to what he calls “a growing chorus” of people raising awareness of the effects of deforestation and human-caused climate change.

“We have a responsibility in how we consume, in how we live our lives,” he says, “that translates to what happens thousands of miles away.”

Honoring the Legacy of a Jesuit Brother

Growing up in New York during the 1970s and ’80s, Davidson says his earliest impressions of Southeast Asia as a boy were shaped by one-sided depictions in what was then mainstream entertainment. Reruns of films such as King Kong (1933), for example, with its fictional Skull Island, “didn’t do a great service to the image of Indigenous peoples,” he notes.

As a Fordham undergraduate, however, Davidson met a Jesuit who helped him develop a broader perspective on a distant corner of the world.

John J. Walter, S.J., had spent decades on Chuuk (formerly Truk), one of the Federated States of Micronesia. Beginning in the late 1940s, Brother Walter worked alongside the Indigenous islanders there to build Catholic churches and schools, including Xavier High School, which opened in 1952. A 1961 article in The Monitor, the official paper of the Archdiocese of San Francisco, described him as a “bearded Jesuit from upstate New York,” a skilled carpenter, handy with “hammer, saw, and T-square,” and a musician who played guitar and accordion.

“When I met him in 1992, I was a junior at Rose Hill,” Davidson says, “and it was by chance that I was assigned to him as the elder Jesuit to visit” as a volunteer at Murray-Weigel Hall, the Jesuits’ health care community in the Bronx.

“He had had at least one stroke that left him in a wheelchair, unable to speak words or sentences, but he had photo albums meticulously organized with typed captions for each photo through the years,” Davidson recalls. “This was how he introduced himself to me, and his inner personality and energy … shined through.”

Last summer, as Davidson planned to document his experiences in Southeast Asia, he recalled the work of his friend Brother Walter, who died in 1995, and he wanted to develop a project to honor the Jesuit’s legacy of service. “He was a pretty incredible person,” Davidson says.

‘The Greatest Gift’

Davidson arrived on the Indonesian island of Komodo on August 3 after a nearly 40-hour journey. For the next four weeks, every day was “filled with traveling, trekking, or exploring of some kind” from 5 a.m. to 8 p.m., he wrote in the preface to the collection of photos he published in September. He spent the majority of his waking and sleeping hours “deep in rainforests alone with a guide,” he wrote, “immersed in vines, branches, climbing up and down hills shrouded in dense foliage, over fallen trees and boulders, rushing streams, into mangroves, along remote beaches, amid extreme humidity, relentless heat and capricious rainstorms.”

In the book and documentary film that Davidson produced, he pays tribute to the people he met “who took care of me, who looked after me, who guided me, who were absolutely gracious hosts,” including a woman who let him and his guide take shelter under the roof of her house during a storm. “I think that’s probably the greatest takeaway, the greatest gift I have from this trip,” he says in the film.

‘Through the Looking Glass’

Davidson adopted the title of his film from the novel Lewis Carroll wrote as a follow-up to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. In Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, young Alice goes through a mirror to find a world where everything, including logic, is reversed. For Davidson, the title is a call to reverse the logic of unrestrained growth that fueled the past two centuries.

“Perhaps in the 19th and 20th centuries, progress was clearing land to build buildings, homes, to support a burgeoning population,” he says. “Maybe in the 21st century, progress is not that, but it’s about how we restore green spaces that were overdeveloped.” He adds that amid “a crescendo of climate change globally,” it’s time to “gaze through the looking glass at the world we will leave for future generations and bravely acknowledge the many aspects of our lives we need to reverse now to truly make the progress necessary to save that which will survive tomorrow.”

Watch the film:

“There’s a long history of young people challenging systems, dismantling systems, and manifesting a vision that has put us on a course to be a different kind of nation,” says Yeampierre, an attorney who co-chairs the national Climate Justice Alliance and is executive director of UPROSE, a Latino community organization based in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.

It’s a message of hope and empowerment she brought to her alma mater on April 19 as the keynote speaker at “Fordham in Community: A Summit on Community Power and Just Climate Actions.”

Born in New York City, Yeampierre moved with her family from Manhattan’s Upper West Side to Harlem, Washington Heights, and the Bronx before enrolling at Fordham, where she majored in political science. After graduation, she earned a law degree at Northeastern and embarked on a trailblazing career as an educational and environmental justice advocate—at the grassroots level and on a grand scale.

As executive director of UPROSE since the mid-1990s, she has helped to double the amount of open space in Sunset Park, facilitate participatory community planning, and organize young people of color for climate justice. She spoke at the White House’s Forum on Environmental Justice in 2010, helped lead the People’s Climate March in 2014, and served as the first Latina chair of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s National Environmental Justice Advisory Council.

Across all her work, Yeampierre has pushed for community-led climate adaptation strategies and sustainable development—and underscored the links between racial injustice and climate change. She spoke with Fordham Magazine about her career journey and what she tells people who want to take action for environmental justice.

Why did you decide to attend Fordham?
I had visited a bunch of colleges—Barnard, Harvard. Fordham just felt like home. I remember walking into the Higher Education Opportunity Program office and seeing people who looked like me, who came from a working-class background. And I thought, “This is a place where I can do what I need to do.”

What was your introduction to climate justice work? Was it an area that you always felt drawn to and knew about?
Absolutely not. I thought that environmentalists were tree huggers who dressed poorly. I didn’t see the connection between the environment and my lived experience. My goal was to become a civil rights litigator. But I grew up in an environmental justice community. My family has all the health disparities that one would have living in the midst of toxic exposure, and so do I.

When I came to UPROSE, I was trying to figure out what we can do that complements what other people are doing and serves unmet needs. I realized that if you couldn’t breathe, you couldn’t fight for justice. So that was my entry into environmental justice work.

Prior to that, you worked for the Puerto Rican Legal Defense Fund, at the American Indian Law Alliance, and as a dean of student affairs at Yale. People might not necessarily think of these as environmental justice or climate justice jobs. But can you talk about the through lines between them and the work that you do now?
The environmental justice and climate justice movement is intersectional. Everything that you do—it doesn’t matter what you study, it doesn’t matter what field, what gives you joy—it’s going to be impacted by climate change. The environment is everything: where we live, where we pray, where we work. It’s everything for us.

At the Puerto Rican Legal Defense Fund, I was working to get students of color into law school, and I was trying to encourage them to use their education as descendants of the Civil Rights Movement to advance our civil and human rights.

Then at the American Indian Law Alliance, we were based in New York, and we were working with tribes and nations from all over. It was a space where all the traditions and all the practices were consistent with the tradition of honoring Mother Earth.

Then I go to Yale to be dean of Puerto Rican student affairs. It was a great opportunity to bring in community and to take the resources that Yale had to honor its host community.

I see that each of these were part of a path that was making it possible for me to understand how different institutions operate, what some of the challenges are for different groupings of people, all of whom come from struggle.

What kind of advice do you give young people about how to make a difference when it comes to environmental justice and climate issues? And how do you encourage them to avoid despair?
If you’re Black, Indigenous, or a person of color, you exist because the generations that came before us, who went through things that we can’t even imagine—who were in shackles, who were tormented, who were tortured, who were raped, who went through unimaginable violations of human rights—imagined us. They stood up and they fought. They built community, and they made it possible for us to be here. They went through existential threats.

Existential threats are not new to us, and we’re literally the descendants of people who walked in their power and transformed the experiences that they had and opened doors so that we could walk through them. To feel despair or to feel like we don’t have power is to dishonor our ancestors, because they went through things that we can only imagine.

The environmental justice movement is intergenerational. We believe that leadership is a continuum and that this country pits generations against each other. There is strength in that intergenerational power, and it doesn’t threaten anyone. There’s room for everyone to exercise leadership.

Across ages, when people say, “I care about this. I want to be, if not directly involved, an ally to the environmental justice and climate justice movements, but I don’t know what concrete steps to take,” what kind of advice do you offer?
A few things. One, I would say, read the Jemez Principles for Democratic Organizing so that you know how to come into the space to do the work necessary to be an ally. Do some mapping to find organizations that are doing this work and have a long history of doing it, and then call them and say, “How can I help? Do you need us to help you raise funds? Do you need us to help you with direct actions? Maybe it’s an art build. I have time. I’m available. How can I help support—not supplant, but support—the work that you are doing?”

If you go to the Climate Justice Alliance website, we have frameworks and guidelines for just about everything. They’re not coming out of one person’s head. They’re coming out of the collective, across the country, because this is an all-hands-on-deck moment. If you have passion, and if you really want to engage in this work, you have to then be part of building relationships and engaging in self-transformation.

As Earth Day comes up, you see a lot of organizations making pledges and starting sustainability initiatives. Sometimes we come to find out that it was “greenwashing,” and that those initiatives are offset by the negative impacts of the company’s actions. What can organizations do to truly make a positive impact and become allies in the climate justice movement?
That’s a hard question, but there are businesses that have been working hard to build those relationships. You’ve got Patagonia. Patagonia is an example of a business where, how they treat their workers, their products, the frameworks, the materials that they produce—they literally contact environmental justice organizations all over the country and they ask, “What do you think of this? How should this be shaped?” They have people who volunteer to support our events, our community gatherings, our direct actions.

We’re going to have to create different economies of scale, and we’re going to have to support small businesses that exist in our community. It’s really a matter of how much is enough for a corporation. At what point are you trying so hard to have more than you need—or doing so much that you’re harming the planet—that you are no longer a company that we want to support?

Right now, we’re experiencing what I call a green gold rush. People are seeing the green economy as an opportunity, and they’re coming at it as opportunists. It’s not going to look any different from the economy that got us to where we are, except that it’s going to have this green patina on it. We’re seeing that with offshore wind at the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal, where it can be a model of a just transition, but it is dangerously close to becoming an ecosystem that really models the bad behavior of some of the companies that are involved, like BP. So we have to monitor that really closely.

How can the public gain the literacy to know which organizations and initiatives truly support the climate justice movement?
It’s hard because you only have so much information, and people want to do the right thing. But I wouldn’t put the blame on the individual.

The truth is that in our community, particularly among Black and brown people, we live within our carbon footprint. I want to say that, because people are so desperate to engage and to participate and are so worried that they are not doing something that helps the planet. And media has given people the impression that they’re the problem. Those corporations, those fossil fuel companies, are the ones responsible.

I really want to make sure that even while people are making informed choices, they’re thinking about what fossil fuel companies are doing to destroy the planet.

We also have to hold the government accountable for giving some money to environmental justice but then funding offshore oil, supporting the Willow Project and other initiatives that harm our community. Or we have to blame big green organizations that say that they’re about the environment but are supporting green hydrogen, carbon sequestration, and other false solutions that turn our communities into sacrifice zones. Those are the folks that we really need to worry about.

It’s easy for our communities to think, “Okay, maybe I need to turn off the lights.” Turning off the lights is not enough. But you know what? Having a community on a solar array that creates community wealth—that’s a really cool thing. Getting off the grid, finding alternative options, and providing renewable energy, those are really cool things, and those are things that are on a different scale.

Interview conducted, condensed, and edited by Adam Kaufman, FCLC ’08.

The 513-page 2023 Economic Report of the President, which was issued on March 23 by the Executive Office of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, cited two papers by Conte and his coauthors in the report’s ninth chapter, “Opportunities for Better Managing Weather Risk in the Changing Climate.”

The papers were An Imperfect Storm: Fat-Tailed Tropical Cyclone Damages, Insurance, and Climate Policy, which was published in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management in 2018, and Noah’s Ark in a Warming World: Climate Change, Biodiversity Loss, and Public Adaptation Costs in the United States, which was published in the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists in 2022.

The presidential report, which is transmitted to Congress no later than 10 days after the submission of the budget each year, presents an overview of the nation’s economic progress and outlines plans for the future.

Climate change was first addressed in the report in 2010 and was included intermittently up until 2018 when it was not addressed. It was reintroduced in last year’s report, and this year, it included the weather risk chapter, which addresses the ways that market failures prevent societies from adapting to the increased risk associated with climate change.

Threats No Longer in the Distant Future

The common thread connecting Conte’s two papers is that threats from climate change that were once thought to be distant are in fact present today. The first is cataclysmic “once in a 1,000 years” storms like Hurricane Harvey, he said, that have become stronger in part because of warmer ocean temperatures. The second is the ongoing rapid loss of flora and fauna that the United Nations has estimated will result in the loss of a million species within decades.

“Our research shows that if we want to be able to adapt to these threats from a changing climate, we need to have a better understanding of the full scope of their impacts,” said Conte.

Reluctant Insurers

“The imperfect storm paper shows how challenging it is to adapt to tropical cyclones because they’re infrequent events that can vary dramatically in the magnitude of their impacts. That variability in the impacts of extreme (tail) events makes it difficult for insurers and policy makers to motivate adaptation,” he said.

Recognizing the Value of Biodiversity

“In ‘Noah’s Ark in A Warming World,’ we looked at the impacts of climate change on the species that are listed under the Endangered Species Act in the U.S., and found that there are going to be big increases in expenses that have to be made to try to protect those species.”

Both problems stem from failures of the market, he said, but they manifest themselves very differently. In the first problem, population centers in the United States continue to grow even in areas that are vulnerable to catastrophic storms, as prices in key markets do not reflect the risk of storm damages, meaning that it is still economically advantageous to do so. In the second, there are no markets to provide clear signals of the value of biodiversity, even though diverse flora and fauna are key to supporting human life.

It’s important for the government to address climate change in a report about economic progress, he said, because the market alone is not equipped to solve the problem.

“A well-designed regulatory policy is going to be critical to deal with the challenge of climate change, so the fact that these policymakers are aware of this type of work sends a signal that they are starting to take these risks seriously,” he said.

That’s why Mehrotra, an English and disability studies professor, wanted to take students in her Pop Culture and Climate Change and Environmental In/Justice, Climate Change, and Disability courses to visit the Climate Museum Pop-Up in SoHo. She felt it would help them understand the issue better and also learn about some tangible action steps they could take.

“When you go and see something in person, it starts becoming real,” said Mehrotra. “And reading about climate change can be really dark and gloomy, so then how can I keep their spirits high?”

She said she also wanted them to see “that we are the ones who can bring the change here.”

The museum aims to use the “power of arts and cultural programming,” to help shift the conversation toward “climate dialogue and action, connecting people, and advancing just solutions.” It features an art exhibit, data points, and reading options in addition to a wall filled with action steps, a postcard writing area, and even a recording booth, where participants could share their stories, perspectives, and more as it relates to climate change. If they signed a release, the information could be used for an upcoming documentary or just as a part of the museum’s research and outreach efforts.

Mehrotra’s students said that the exhibit helped provide inspiration and motivation.

For Gabriel Sharp, a first-year student at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, the trip reignited his passion for environmental issues.

“My biggest takeaway is that climate action is actually really accessible for me, and something that’s well within my power,” said Sharp, who came to Fordham from Seattle, where he was involved in the Sunrise Movement—a youth climate organization. Since he had to leave that behind when he moved to New York he was happy to find another way to take action on the issue. Sharp, who spoke while writing a postcard, said that he planned to get back involved in efforts like the Sunrise Movement here.

Others said that it helped them learn about how many other people cared about environmental and climate issues.

“We talk a lot especially in Professor [Mehrotra]’s class about our role as Gen Z, and especially first-years at Fordham, what are we actually facing? And as scary as it is, it felt like a breath of fresh air to see the statistics and see that there actually are people out there who care, it doesn’t feel so alone and daunting,” said Karina Ruiz, a first-year student at Fordham College at Lincoln Center. “It’s motivating.”

Many filled out postcards calling on state and federal legislators to support climate-related policies and laws, while others wrote to institutions, asking them to divest from fossil fuel industries.

Kellen Zeng is a sophomore from the Gabelli School of Business at Rose Hill who is originally from New York City and involved in climate advocacy outside of school. She hopes the visit will inspire students to act.

“We’re taking a class, we’re learning much about climate change, and so I just really hope that all of my peers at Fordham and everyone who visits here actually takes the next step of doing something about it,” Zeng said.

Zeng said that she also hopes her classmates get involved in environmental and sustainability efforts on campus, such as those being coordinated through the Center for Community Engaged Learning’s Laudato Si action plan.

Emmanuel Okeke, a first-year student at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, was particularly captivated by the postcard display from artist David Opdyke, which features postcards from around the U.S. Opdyke added elements to each one to depict potential effects of climate change, such as a postcard featuring coastlines that were now underwater.

“This really has gotten to me,” he said. “I wish I could take it home with me—there’s so many details, I feel like you can spend hours just analyzing each one.”

Across all of the cards, Opdyke drew ropes, aiming to show how all of these areas and issues are connected. Okeke said this made him think about climate change both in the U.S. and his home country of Nigeria, particularly the impacts of decades of colonialism and other extractive practices by Western countries, such as drilling oil.

“They make all this money—we don’t make money from this but our people are dying because of the oil and pollution,” he said.

“I was looking at [action items in the exhibit] and it was like ‘oh, vote climate’—I don’t even know if I can vote climate [in Nigeria]. I don’t think many of the politicians care about climate, which is sad,” he said, noting that’s partly because “you can only care about climate when you have addressed a few other glaring needs.”