When on PBS Charlie Rose asked you, while still in high school, what you wanted to be when you grew up, you immediately replied, “activist.” After Williams and Berkeley Law School, that ambition got revised to scholar/activist, with your path-breaking work focused on the intellectual, legal, moral, and practical lineaments of environmental justice. The communities and nations contributing to climate change the least suffer from its consequences the most. What do the polluters, mostly rich and white, owe these victims, mostly poor and not white, especially when their communities, and even their whole nations, face being subsumed by rising seas? What might the term “nation” mean when its members have been disbursed? What mechanisms in international law need we create to ensure that justice is served? Fresh thinking on these challenges has been the hallmark of your scholarship and your service as the inaugural director of the Center for Island Climate Adaptation and Policy. Fulfilling your teenage vision, you now, through your writing, your lecturing around the world, and your appearances in global media, are engaging a growing number of thinkers, policy makers, and the public in what may be the most vexing and urgent intellectual work of our time.
In recognition of your distinguished achievement in environmental justice, Williams College is proud to honor you with its Bicentennial Medal.
September 17, 2016
Megamenu Social