Science, Ecology and Faith Series
Hosted by the Interfaith Consortium for Ecological Civilization (ICEC), this speaker series focuses on climate change and sustainable development and the important role of the interfaith community as a catalyst for change. It is held in partnership with the United Nations Committee of Religious NGOs and the CoNGO Committee on Sustainable Development.
Trebbe Johnson, author, founder and director of Radical Joy for Hard Times
Aphrodite at the Landfill
May 1, 2013 – 1:00- 2:30
Aphrodite at the Landfill is a rousing call to readers to turn their attention to the kinds of places most people would rather forget: the clearcut forests, paved wetlands, fracked farms, and polluted rivers that once were beautiful and meaningful and now are under assault. Yet when the places we love are damaged, we humans hurt too. And it is by reconciling with the wounded places in our midst in bold, creative ways that we forge a new definition of activism.
Part I, “The Environment Isn’t Here Yet,” explores five subtle cultural assumptions about how we ought to react to a broken, toxic, or ugly environment and why these concepts get in the way of our living the “sustainable” life on Earth that we all supposedly aspire to. Part II, “Beauty as Earth Activism,” unveils attitudes and practices that shift thinking and remake traditional environmentalism into a new field where existential action, play, spectacle, and the church social meet.
Trebbe Johnson is the author of The World Is a Waiting Lover (2005, with a foreword by Thomas Moore) and has published many articles and essays about the relationship between people and their places in Sierra, Orion, Spirituality and Health, The Nation, and other magazines. She is a consulting editor and frequent contributor to Parabola. Trebbe is the founder and director of Radical Joy for Hard Times, a non-profit organization devoted to finding and making beauty in wounded places.
As a consortium of religious and secular organizations dedicated to ecological civilization, the Interfaith Consortium for Ecological Civilization (ICEC)’s organizing partners are the Temple of Understanding, GreenFaith, the Forum of Religion and Ecology at Yale University, and the International Communities for the Renewal of the Earth, in consultation with the New York office of the United Nations Environmental Program. The mission of ICEC is to facilitate a dialogue among the various sectors of society on ecological civilization, gather wisdom from this dialogue that will inspire and guide individuals and social transformations, and lead in the transition to an ecological civilization. Click for more information >>