Wednesday 5 April 2023, 17.30–19.30 / Casco HQ
Please sign up by 22 March by sending an email to info@terracritica.net (max 20 persons)
Optional: a vegan dinner (contribution 10 euro per person)
A new series of ReadingRoom at Casco Art Institute is nearly with us! After a long period of silence, ReadingRoom ready to start up again and hope that many of you are up for joining.
Series Eight wants to continue the concerns of earlier ReadingRoom sessions with CPC, the capitalist-patriarchal-colonial formation that also entails ecological devastation. But since Octavia Butler taught us that “the only lasting truth is change” (Parable of the Sower 1993), we also welcome a change of rhythm. Starting a new series in spring means that we can take time until the summer and beyond, depending on how we go with our collective readings. We’d like our new series to concentrate on one text only and see where that takes us. At this point in time, a focused reading can get us deeper into thinking and questioning than the assemblage of texts we had often been working with in ReadingRoom.
Given the rapidly worsening climate emergency, ReadingRoom proposes to read together the recent publication by the Earth4All initiative, entitled Earth for All: A Survival Guide for Humanity (September 2022). Sandrine Dixson-Declève, Owen Gaffney, Jayati Ghosh, Jorgen Randers, Johan Rockström and Per Espen Stoknes put together this most recent report to the Club of Rome, fifty years after The Limits of Growth (1972).
As the development economist Jayati Ghosh said at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2023, “skyrocketing wealth and income inequality” are still at the root of today’s global polycrisis. And, as the open letter of the Earth4All initiative’s Transformational Economics Commission to “world leaders” holds: “Despite the fact the world is in a climate emergency, the richest 1%— over 80 million people — are the fastest-growing source of emissions by far” and “every single month the world burns through 1% of the remaining carbon budget for any hope of stabilising climate at 1.5°C” and most people are “kept in a state of economic insecurity”, despite the world being wealthier than ever before (see https://www.earth4all.life/open-letter-davos-tax).
ReadingRoom would like to collectively find out what we can learn from Earth for All. What insights do the analyses offer? But also, which additional questions might their suggestions generate? Do we hesitate at their macro-economic perspectives, or can we embrace them? Or both? Let’s make this series of ReadingRoom a space to critically engage with the prospects of an earth for all, together.
If you are up for joining us for Series Eight we would be delighted to see you for a first session on Wednesday 5 April 2023, 17.30–19.30. During this first session, we would like to engage with chapters 1-3. The text will be made available to you upon registration. As always, ReadingRoom is followed by a vegan dinner (contribution 10 euro per person). If you wish to participate in this session, please sign up by 22 March by sending an email to info@terracritica.net. The meeting will be held in person and to keep everyone around one table during our conversations, we have to close registration at 20. Please also indicate in your registration email if you would like to stay for dinner.
