#LaborTalks: Ecology, Community, Prosperity – a Conversation with Eliza Griswold

What is the price of fracking? In the Appalachian town of Amity, PA, a Texas-based energy company struck deals with residents to frack the Marcellus shale that underlies their properties. Not long after the drill sites were built, farm animals and pets began to die, and children fell ill. As Eliza Griswold documents in her book Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America, a group of town residents united to investigate and seek redress, commencing a long struggle against not only the frackers, but also the state and federal agencies with which the energy company colludes.

In #LaborTalks: Ecology, Community, Prosperity – a Conversation with Eliza Griswold, poet, translator, and journalist Eliza Griswold will join BISR faculty Ajay Singh Chaudhary for wide-ranging conversation about fracking (what it is and what it does), energy politics, corporate and regulatory collusion, resistance, and the economics of ecological sustainability. Is increased natural-gas extraction economically necessary—or even desirable? What role do governmental agencies play? Can an energy-based economy be both productive and ecologically sustainable? Can capitalism self-reform, or is the implementation of some alternative economy a necessary first step to avoiding the very the worst effects of climate change?

The event is free and open to the public. Please RSVP below. #LaborTalks is an ongoing series co-presented by The Workmen’s Circle, The Sidney Hillman Foundation, Union Communication Services, Dissent Magazine, the Jewish Labor Committee, the DSA Jewish Solidarity Caucus, Jewish Currents Magazine, and The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. A reception will follow the talk.

Participants

• Eliza Griswold

  Eliza Griswold is the author of The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam, which won the 2011 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize. Her translations of Afghan women’s folk poems, I Am the Beggar of the World, was awarded the 2015 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. She has held fellowships from the New America Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and Harvard University, and in 2010
  the American Academy in Rome awarded her the Rome Prize for her poems. Currently a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University, she lives in New York with her husband and son.

• Ajay Singh Chaudhary

  Ajay Singh Chaudhary is the executive director of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and a core faculty member specializing in social and political theory. His research focuses on social and political theory, Frankfurt School critical theory, political economy, media, religion, and post-colonial studies. He has written for the The Guardian, Los Angeles Review of Books, Quartz, Social Text, Dialectical Anthropology, The Jewish Daily Forward, Filmmaker Magazine, and 3quarksdaily, among other venues. Ajay is currently writing a book on the politics of climate change.

Event Schedule

Thursday, 6:30-9:00pm
February 28, 2019

$0.00

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