Postponed
Book Signing: 6:30pm
Lecture: 7:30pm
One of the greatest challenges we’ve ever faced as a species is anthropogenic climate change. Can the history of climate variability and change offer us solutions for the future? Paleoclimatology — the reconstruction of Earth’s past — reveals how shifts in the environment shaped the rise and fall of civilizations. Climate change has often been associated with what seem to be “contagious” risks, from conflict to pandemic disease. Drawing lessons and perspectives from the collapse of empires to the global crisis of the Little Ice Age, Kyle Harper explores the possibilities of navigating future crises by approaching both physical climate and human societies as complex systems.
Kyle Harper is Professor of Classics and Letters at the University of Oklahoma, and a member of the Fractal Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. Harper is an historian whose work integrates the natural sciences into the study of the human past. He is interested in the role of climate change and pandemic disease in the ancient world, especially in the Roman period. More broadly, he works on the global history of humans as agents of ecological change and asks how we can approach questions about biodiversity, health, and environmental sustainability from a historical perspective.
Reserve your free tickets to this event via the Lensic Performing Arts Center's box office. This discussion will also be streamed live via SFI's YouTube channel, and recorded for future viewing.
The 2024 Santa Fe Institute Community Lecture Series is free to attend thanks to generous sponsorship by the McKinnon Family Foundation, with additional support from the Santa Fe Reporter, and the Lensic Performing Arts Center.
This event is also supported by the James S. McDonnell Foundation Grant Number 220020491, Adaptation, Aging, and the Arrow of Time. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the James S. McDonnell Foundation.