Redesigning our relationship to natural systems, wrestling rhinoceros beetles, launching the Urban Space Station and other Cross(x)Species Adventures

The Climate crisis has revealed a more insidious and widespread crisis: the crisis of agency, aka: what to do-in the face of shared, uncertain threat and challenging our political agency, our cultural imagination and our scientific and economic understanding. This talk asks if we might respond, not only with serious concern, but if and how our pleasures and fascinations might become a force of social and environmental transformation. Recent public experiments, including: the Cross(x)Species Adventure club, exploring possible foods and food systems that not only lessen our collective negative effect, but (exquisite) foods that improve environmental health and augment biodiversity; xAirport: re-imagining flight and flight systems to reclaim the wonder of flight and explore a form of urban mobility that reconstructs natural systems; and other projects selected from a recent survey exhibition called "BiodiverCITY, 47 important ideas and technologies for the urban future" as they provide adventure, wonder and exploration. The projects posit that the work to re-imagine and redesign our relationship to natural systems, more-ever work that rebuilds urban ecologies, demands participatory platforms and wondrous engagement that are well suited to the irreducible complexity of socio-ecological systems and the challenging environmental issues we face. During the course of the lecture we will make some gentlemanly wagers on the possibilities and strategies for producing a biodiverse, tasty and healthy urban future.

Speaker: Natalie Jeremijenko, Director, Environmental Health Clinic, and Associate Professor in the Visual Art Department, NYU