A sophomore at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, Magazine spent last fall interning with Fordham’s Office of Sustainability. His work included collecting data that the University will use to establish a framework to measure its sustainability performance.

He said his work not only helped him learn how to encourage sustainable practices, it also gave him the chance to make Fordham more sustainable. 

“Part of being in a community of people that you come to know, and you come to care about, is also wanting to see it improve,” he said. 

“So a lot of my perspective going into this internship has been ‘What ways can I improve the Fordham of tomorrow?’”

This Is My Community

Magazine’s interest in sustainability and climate issues also circles back to another community: his hometown of East Flatbush, Brooklyn. He lives there with his family and commutes to the Lincoln Center campus. 

According to government statistics, the neighborhood’s lack of cooling infrastructure makes its citizens more vulnerable to climate-change-related heat waves than anywhere else in NYC, making the issue of sustainability very personal to him. 

Along with several siblings, he’s part of his family’s first generation to attend college. The ability to major in environmental studies is what drew him to Fordham.

“When the neighborhood has any sort of disaster that can be enhanced by climate change, we feel it very hard,” he said.

“I live here. These are my neighbors, this is my community. I don’t want to see East Flatbush turn to charcoal in 2030 or 2050.”

Peeking Under the Hood 

Magazine had participated in climate justice-related activities in high school, so when he learned about the Office of Sustainability’s internship program, he jumped at the chance to join the program along with 25 other undergraduate students.

Along with several other interns, he was asked to help the office gather data to fill out a framework known as STARS (Sustainability Tracking Assessment and Rating System). It was developed by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) and is colloquially known as AASHE STARS. Institutions can earn AASHE ratings based on everything from sustainability-related courses to water usage.

There are 372 colleges and universities with AASHE STARS ratings ranging from bronze to platinum. Fordham will soon submit the data necessary to gain a rating as well. 

For AASHE STARS, Magazine gathered data related to the University’s investments. Activists have long advocated that institutions that embrace climate change mitigation policies should reconsider supporting the fossil fuel industry through their endowments; at Fordham, President Tania Tetlow announced that Fordham’s Board of Trustees had created an Advisory Committee on Socially Responsible Investing, comprising students, faculty, administrators, and alumni, to discuss issues around ethical investments.

Magazine compared the experience to peeking under the hood of a car to see how the engine works. 

“This was my first instance of being able to work in policy from inside the house instead of outside of it,” he said, noting that it deepened his understanding of the ways a large institution functions.

Improving the Fordham of Tomorrow

Gathering data and synthesizing it into a form that can be submitted for AASHE STAR consideration was somewhat tedious, but Magazine said it was worth it.

His takeaway is that Fordham is moving in the right direction when it comes to sustainability. In addition to embracing renewable energy and working with local communities to help them deal with climate change, establishing benchmarks such as an AASHE STAR rating moves the University toward a greener future.

“Even though things move slowly, they’re going to keep moving. They’re not going to stop,” he said. 

“That it is something that we can work on, and we’ll reach the point where we get to that destination.”

If you want to build a career fighting climate change, here are eight “green” degrees to consider:

1. Environmental Science

Environmental science majors study the science behind environmental challenges like climate change, pollution, and habitat destruction. You’ll learn to analyze ecosystems, guide conservation efforts, and conduct research that informs public policy.

Students in Fordham’s environmental science program do fieldwork alongside scientists at The Calder Center, the University’s biological field station on 113 acres of protected forest preserve in Armonk, New York.  

2. Environmental Studies

As an environmental studies major, you’ll examine the “human” side of climate change, taking data from the natural sciences and blending it with a strong foundation in the humanities and social sciences to explore political, economic, and societal solutions to environmental issues.

“One of the central areas of work is environmental justice, the idea that traditionally marginalized socio-economic groups should not have to disproportionately bear the burdens of climate change, especially when they are not the main parties responsible for it,” said John van Buren, director of the environmental studies program at the University.

Graduates of Fordham’s program have gone on to build successful careers in government, law, business, urban planning, environmental organizations, public health, and more.

3. Business

You probably don’t think of environmentalism when you think of business, but the reality is the fight against climate change requires industries to develop more sustainable practices. That means business leaders need the skills to build ethical supply chains, create more environmentally friendly products, and implement corporate responsibility strategies. 

Students at Fordham’s Gabelli School of Business can choose a concentration or minor in social innovation and sustainable business, preparing them to lead profitable businesses that also benefit people and the planet.

4. Biological Sciences

Biology is not only fundamental to understanding the impact of climate change on living systems, it’s also key to addressing the crisis. 

“Biologists are providing critical information on how climate change is affecting the crops we depend on for food, as well as the impact on endangered species and the spread of infectious diseases,” said Steve Franks, professor in the Department of Biology at Fordham. “They’re also helping to develop ways to reduce climate change by creating innovative and sustainable approaches to agriculture and many industries.”

5. Urban Studies

An urban studies major focuses on the design and management of cities, opening doors to a career in city planning, environmental consulting, or community development, where you can work to create cities that are more climate resilient. 

“I believe that urban studies programs are becoming more and more important to the climate movement as they provide students with the academic foundation to understand not only how cities can contribute to climate change, but also to develop ways to ameliorate its worst impacts,” said Maria Biskup, director of Fordham’s undergraduate urban studies program.

6. International Studies

Majoring in international studies can prepare you to combat climate change on a global scale. This field equips students with an understanding of the complex dynamics between countries, cultures, economies, and the environment. 

After graduation, you could choose a humanitarian career path, or go into journalism, the public sector, education, and more—all fields that provide ample opportunities for climate work.  

Ian Muir Smith, who graduated with an international studies degree from Fordham in 2022, went on to organize a UN-endorsed youth climate conference with other Fordham alums. 

7. Political Science

A political science major prepares you to influence legislation, promote international cooperation, and lead advocacy efforts in the public and private sectors, including those focused on climate change. 

Graduates can work in government agencies, NGOs, or international organizations, advocating for climate-friendly policies and helping to implement global climate agreements like the Paris Agreement.

8. Journalism

Journalists have the power to hold industries and governments accountable—a vital role when it comes to the climate crisis. Majoring in journalism can prepare you to report on policy debates, environmental disasters, and the ways marginalized communities are impacted by climate change. A journalism degree can also serve as a strong foundation for careers in communications, media management, marketing, and more.

The panel is an independent advisory body that synthesizes scientific information on climate change. Members advise city policymakers on local resilience and adaptation strategies that protect against extreme heat, heavy rain, coastal storm surges, and other climate hazards. 

“Much of New York City comprises islands. We must be prepared for the fact that we’re at risk of future hurricane landfall, we’re going to lose land to sea-level rise, and there will also be drought and temperature increases,” said Conte.

“I’m very excited to contribute knowledge that can be put to good use for a panel like this.”

Conte is the first Fordham professor to join the panel, which was first formed in 2009 and renews its membership every three years, tapping experts from government, non-profits, and academia. This appointment is not the first time the government has called on Conte for his expertise;  his research on climate change was cited in a major report issued by the White House. 

Learning from Past Climate Disasters

Each new panel is tasked with issuing a report at the end of its three-year term. Conte said that past panels have analyzed global climate models that had been recently released, downscaling them to show how they might affect New York City.

No new models have been released recently, so he said he expects this panel will dig deeper into the challenges that are already known–particularly those highlighted by recent disasters. The group will hold a series of public meetings this year to gauge the public’s interest in specific areas. 

Conte said the panel will provide important guidance during a critical time. 

“Given the outcome of the recent election, we expect that federal leadership in this area is going to be greatly diminished,” he said. 

“New York City is a high profile area, so this kind of assessment is important to maintain the focus on the challenges we face and show what can happen at the local level to reduce the impacts of climate change.”

Recent examples of extreme weather worth re-examining are numerous. Conte said the panel may determine what will happen to water supplies if droughts like the one that lasted nearly a month continue. Or it might try to quantify the risks that New Yorkers will be exposed to as a result of extreme bad air days caused by Canadian wildfires or those posed by brush fires that have been on the rise in the New York City area. 

“We’re also thinking about when the next Superstorm Sandy is going to come through and how we’ll have to deal with it,” he said. 

Conte, who has published research on outdoor air pollution in New York City, the challenges of managing tropical cyclone risk, and the impact of climate change on natural capital, hopes the panel will explore each of these topics.

The Everyday Costs of Climate Change

He’s also hopeful that as an economist, he’ll be able to help the panel illustrate the societal costs of climate change and pollution that are poorly understood by the general public. 

“One of the big challenges is that, as we just saw in this election, everyone cares about the price of milk, but we don’t have a price for clean air or a price for not having to miss work because of asthma or because it’s too hot,” he said.

“I’m hoping to provide literature that shows what types of policy interventions are successful when facing these challenges and what the difficulties are for policymakers in putting them into action.”

“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: