Title and description:
"Speaking Youth to Power: Climate Change, Young People and Human Rights."
The course briefly introduces the science of climate change and its impacts, both physical and psychological, on children and youth globally and here in Oregon. An overview of the modern human rights movement since 1947 follows, with special focus on the most fully signed and ratified human rights document in history, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Finally a review of ways that climate change directly and indirectly impacts children's rights and a few ideas for how young people can pressure governments to respond.
The course consists of suggested short readings, introductory lectures and class discussion.
Schedule:
Eight one-hour meetings at 6:30pm on eight consecutive Wednesdays starting October 1.
Location:
Via zoom.
My BA is from Notre Dame and MA and PhD are in Philosophy from Marquette University. I taught Philosophy at North Seattle College for 33 years and at four other colleges and universities before settling there.
My work since retiring looks at the ways human rights bear on environmental issues and especially on the climate crisis. In 2015 I served on the drafting group for the “Declaration on Human Rights and Climate Change,” and co-authored the journal article about it. I co-organized the 2018 Special Session on Human Rights, Fracking and Climate Change conducted by the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal in Rome.
Kathleen Dean Moore (at OSU) and I then put together a book based on that Tribunal’s Special Session; Bearing Witness: The Human Rights Case Against Fracking and Climate Change was published by Oregon State University Press in 2021.
I co-authored the screenplay for “Bedrock Rights,” a film about that Special Session and also wrote Youth Climate Courts: How You Can Host a Human Rights Trial for People and Planet, published by Routledge in 2022.