The 2019 Lear-Conant Symposium

On a snowy Saturday, March 2nd, 2019 the GNCE hosted its biennial Lear-Conant symposium on

"Climate Action from Below:
A Cause for Optimism?"

We're grateful to our four wonderful speakers who made the trip to New London:

David Gordon (UC Santa Cruz)
Matt Hoffmann (University of Toronto)
Lisa Kretz (University of Evansville)
Barry Rabe (University of Michigan)

We're especially glad that so many from the New London community and from around Southeastern CT were able to join us for the day.

L to R: Matt Hoffmann, David Gordon, Barry Rabe, Lisa Kretz

Subnational action on climate change

We wanted to host a conference focusing on climate change, but also wanted to investigate alternatives to the usual ways of framing the issues. So we invited three political scientists (Gordon, Hoffmann, and Rabe) whose work focuses on subnational climate action: networks of cities holding each other accountable, regional carbon markets, and other kinds of municipal, state/province, and regional experiments in climate change mitigation. 

Making the case for hope

We also had a philosopher (Kretz) who addressed questions about the moral psychology of climate action, arguing that a hopeful attitude can have pragmatic, political and psychological benefits.

Thanks to Linda Lear, to the Frederick Henry Sykes Memorial Fund, to the Jean Thomas Lambert Lecture Fund, to the Beaver Brook Fund,  and to the Dilley Lecture Fund. 

For more information about previous GNCE conferences, visit our web site.