Join Greenpoint Library and Environmental Education Center and author David McDermott Hughes in a discussion on his new book Who Owns the Wind: Climate Crisis and the Hope of Renewable Energy.
Drawing on his own experience conducting research in a small Spanish village surrounded by wind turbines, Hughes investigates why people hate wind farms as well as who exactly benefits from them--namely, the owners of the land on which turbines are built. Hughes argues that wind and the energy it produces should not be private property, but a public good that benefits whole communities.
According to Naomi Klein, "Hughes is doing some of the most innovative thinking and writing about energy democracy in the world. The movements for climate justice are in his debt."
Mr. Hughes will be in discussion with educator Ashley Dawson.
David McDermott Hughes is a professor of Anthropology at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. He has written articles for Boston Review and three previous books, including Energy without Conscience. As an activist, Hughes has served as president of his faculty union and as a member of the Climate Task Force of the American Federation of Teachers.
Ashley Dawson is Professor of Postcolonial Studies in the English Department at the Graduate Center / City University of New York and the College of Staten Island. His latest books include People’s Power: Reclaiming the Energy Commons (O/R, 2020), Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change (Verso, 2017), and Extinction: A Radical History (O/R, 2016). A member of the Social Text Collective and the founder of the CUNY Climate Action Lab, he is a long-time climate justice activist. He is currently at work on a book entitled Environmentalism from Below and, with the Environmental Humanities Lab in Stockholm, on the creation of a global network of organizations devoted to radical people’s planning for climate action.
This is an outdoor event. Registration is required as are masks in the library.