Berkeley Talks

In adopting a different diet or driving less, a person has an effect on the planet, says Robert Frank, an economics professor at Cornell University. But not for the reason they might think."If you don't do it, the world will be the same as if you do it," said Frank, who spoke at UC Berkeley in January. "But the effect you have through your own actions are only a small fraction of the total effect you have because when you do something, other people see you do it, and they do it, too."Frank, author of the 2020 book Under the Influence: Putting Peer Pressure to Work, joined Dan Kammen, a professor of energy at Berkeley, at the campus's Goldman School of Public Policy on Jan. 28, 2020, to discuss how he sees peer pressure as a powerful tool to fight climate change.Listen to the talk and read a transcript on Berkeley News. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

"If having a gun really made you safer, then America would be one of the safest countries in the world. It’s not," said Gary Younge, a professor of sociology at Manchester University and former editor-at-large at the Guardian, in a lecture at UC Berkeley on March 4, 2020."Yet while Americans consistently favor more gun control," Younge continues, "gun laws have generally become more lax. That is partly due to the material resources of the gun lobby. But it is also about the central role of the gun, what it represents in the American narrative, and the inability of gun control advocates to develop a counter-narrative. ... When the national narrative is a story of conquering, dominating, force and power, a broad atavistic attachment to the gun can have more pull than narrower rational arguments to contain it."Listen to the lecture and read a transcript on Berkeley News.Detail of a mural by Kyle Holbrook and local youth in Miami, Florida. (Photo by Terence Faircloth via Flickr) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For the first week of quarantine during the global COVID-19 pandemic, Rebecca Vitali-DeCola's 82-year-old dad, Joe DeCola, seemed upbeat."He was like, 'I got my dinner and I have this beautiful bouquet of flowers.' He just sounded, like, tucked-in and content."DeCola has stage 4 lung cancer. He's become accustomed to isolating himself from time to time, especially during flu season. But after a few months sheltering in place this time around, his daughter said it started to get harder for him. "...He said, 'I’m feeling so lonely. I’m just really, really lonely.'”That's why Vitali-DeCola, a teacher who has been staying at home with her husband and son in Brooklyn, while her dad is all by himself in Manhattan, decided to do a happiness practice by UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center called "36 Questions for Increasing Closeness." She recently joined host Dacher Keltner on the Science of Happiness podcast to discuss her experience.Listen to the interview and read the transcript on Berkeley News. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

"All waste is global," said Kate O'Neill, a professor in the the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at UC Berkeley, at a campus event in February. "What we throw away has value. What we throw away often travels the globe. And that's not just the things we know about like electronic wastes, but also plastics... and things like cars, used cars, secondhand cars, clothes, bikes — even discarded food — will actually travel to some other countries, someplace where it may or may not be used..."O'Neill, author of the 2019 book Waste, gave a Feb. 5 lecture, sponsored by Berkeley’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI), about how the things we throw away go through entire lifecycles after we toss them. And she discusses how China's 2017 decision to stop importing paper and plastic scrap in the condition it had been has disrupted the global waste economy and changed how communities around the world recycle.Read a transcript and listen on Berkeley News. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Robert Hass, a professor in UC Berkeley's Department of English and U.S. Poet Laureate from 1995 to 1997, read from Summer Snow — his first poetry collection since 2010 — on Feb. 6, 2020, at the Morrison Library's monthly event, Lunch Poems.Geoffrey O'Brien, a Berkeley English professor and poet, introduced Hass: "He has a remarkable way of making a language that's tensile and full of prosodies, and yet still feels like down-home conversation that cats and dogs can understand," he said.Hass read five poems — "The Grandfather's Tale," "Dancing," "First Poem," "Nature Notes in the Morning" and "Cymbeline."Listen to full readings from Summer Snow and read a transcript on Berkeley News. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Art Cullen, editor of the Storm Lake Times, a family-run newspaper in Storm Lake, Iowa, joined Berkeley Journalism professor and author Michael Pollan on Jan. 29, 2020, to discuss journalism in rural America, Trump and the farm vote, immigration, regenerative agriculture and the potential for farmers to sequester carbon to help curb climate change. In 2017, Cullen won a Pulitzer prize for his reporting on polluted water, fertilizer runoff and powerful corporate agricultural interests.The event was sponsored by the UC Berkeley-11th Hour Food and Farming Journalism Fellowship.Listen to the talk and read the transcript on Berkeley News. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In 1968, following a wave of urban uprisings, politicians worked to end the practice of redlining by passing the Housing and Urban Development Act. While the act was meant to encourage mortgage lenders and the real estate industry to treat black homebuyers equally, the disaster that came after revealed that racist exclusion hadn’t been eradicated, but rather transformed into a new phenomenon of predatory inclusion.On Jan. 24, 2020, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, assistant professor of African American studies at Princeton University, discussed her new book Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, as part of the Matrix Lecture series at UC Berkeley. Her book, which covers the time period from the 1968 Housing and Urban Development Act to the 1974 Housing and Community Development Act, exposes how exploitative real estate practices continued well after housing discrimination was banned.Listen to the talk and read the transcript on Berkeley News. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

"...At this very moment in our history, the men rising to the highest office in country after country... are full-fledged planetary arsonists," said Naomi Klein at a Berkeley Journalism event on Oct. 24, 2019."They are pouring fuels on these fires with defiance. We have Trump rolling back every environmental law conceivable, cracking open public lands to unrestricted drilling and fracking, trolling Greta [Thunberg] on Twitter, ogling Greenland for the fossil fuels now available under the melting ice. But this is not just about Trump, this is a global phenomenon..."Klein, author of the book On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal and the Gloria Steinem Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University, discussed with journalism lecturer Mark Schapiro the need for a fundamental transformation of our economy and politics as climate disruptions accelerate.Listen to the talk and read a transcript on Berkeley News. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On Feb. 21, 2020, Deirdre Cooper Owens, a professor of the history of medicine at the University of Nebraska, was on campus to discuss her work tracing the origins of medical racism back to its roots. In her book Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the origins of American Gynecology, Cooper Owens reveals the ways the field of gynecology, pioneered by 19th century medical men, was deeply intertwined with the institution of slavery.This talk was part of 400 Years of Resistance to Slavery and Injustice, a yearlong initiative at Berkeley that marks the 400th anniversary of the forced arrival of enslaved Africans in the English colonies.Read a Q&A with Cooper Owens on Berkeley News.Read a transcript of this podcast episode on Berkeley News. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

"During global climate crisis, we need more writing in and through water," read poet Indira Allegra at UC Berkeley earlier this month. "This is the perspective through which we must contextualize ourselves. The downward squint into saltwater mysteries or the movement of light across the surface of freshwater above. Emergency is not separate from us. We have to partner it. We must find ways in our mythologies and in our language to partner disaster."Allegra, whose work has been featured in exhibitions at the Arts Incubator in Chicago and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, joined Chiyuma Elliott, an assistant professor in Berkeley's Department of African American Studies, and Lyn Hejinian, who teaches in the Department of English, in reading their poems on Feb. 4, 2020, as part of Poetry and the Senses, a two-year initiative by Berkeley's Arts Research Center that will explore the "relevance and urgency of lyrical making and storytelling in times of political crisis, and the value of engaging the senses as an act of care, mindfulness and resistance."Addressing this year's theme of "emergency," the three poets touched on a range of topics, including natural disasters, police brutality, the meaning of borders and gun violence."My uncle Jim was murdered in 2000, along with his girlfriend and her daughter and an older couple," read Elliott from a poem called "On Skipping a Funeral." "Jim was collateral damage in a botched extortion scheme. He died in his sleep and the others were not so lucky. It took me about 10 years before I could even start to write poems about this. Each week, almost 700 people in the U.S. die from gun violence. A lot of people, a lot of families, wrestling with the long reverb of violence and of preventable death."Learn more about Poetry and the Senses on Berkeley's Arts Research Center's website.Read a transcript and listen to the talk on Berkeley News. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.