Central College and the Iowa United Nations Association will host a climate change conference next weekend.
The conference runs from 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. on Saturday, April 25th, with check-in at 8:30 a.m. in Roe Center. The conference is free to attend, and lunch will also be provided free to the first 100 guests to register. This conference is part of Sustainability Week at Central, which also features All Iowa Food Day on Thursday, April 23rd. Director of dining services Richard Phillips will feature dishes prepared from local foods, plus the school will host an outdoor farmer’s market.
Brian Campbell, director for sustainability education at Central, said climate change is an urgent issue affecting people around the world — and many are ill-equipped to respond. “It’s not just some far-off issue for the polar bears,” Campbell said. “It’s for real people, right now.”
The conference title is inspired by words of Martin Luther King, Jr., who called concerned citizens to confront “the fierce urgency of now” and “move past indecision to action.”
In addition to learning about climate change, director of community-based learning Cheri Doane said guests will learn how they can get involved. “This isn’t a conference about ‘everyone needs to recycle and change their light bulbs to the little curlicues and try to ride their bikes,’” Doane said. “It’s much more than that.” Doane said participants will learn effective ways they can show policymakers they care about the earth and its inhabitants.
Keynote speaker Michael Roman returns to Central College, where he worked as service learning AmeriCorps VISTA 2002-2003. Roman has since completed master’s degrees in anthropology and public health and a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology. Roman gained his first experience discussing climate change on Central’s campus, and he continues to share about possible impacts that have been coming true over the past decade. “There are entire countries devastated that nobody knows about,” Roman said. “I’m really excited to bring that message back to Central, where it literally all started for me.”
Roman has extensive connections with the island nation of Kiribati and will share images and stories of the impacts of climate change through rising sea level, king tides and typhoons. He served in the Peace Corps there 2000-2002, and the nation remains one of the world’s most vulnerable to climate change.
“I’m coming back with a lot of real voices from the nation,” Roman said. “I’m hoping I can make people understand that this is something real. It’s not something they need to worry about for their children and grandchildren – it’s something they need to worry about for themselves. We might be alive when these countries disappear.”
A second keynote speaker, Todd Edwards, is an expert in global climate change governance and will present on the 2015 United Nations Climate Talks in Paris — and how Iowa citizens can be part of the process.
In a conference workshop, Anya Butt, associate professor of biology, will speak about the science of climate change. Guests will be able to tour the Roe Center in a workshop led by director of facilities planning and management Mike Lubberden and architect Kevin Nordmeyer. The Roe Center is Central’s platinum LEED-rated building, with a living roof, daylight harvesting system and other green design features. Also, students Amy Andrews ’15 and Ethan Van Kooten ’15 will give a tiny house tour, and Jakob Steenhoek ’15 will present his project to clean up a former coal mine in Marion County with an unmanned aerial vehicle or drone.