Among the mountain ranges of the world, the Himalayas are perhaps the most spectacular, mysterious, and majestic. Along with the Tibetan Plateau, the Himalayas are home to 15,000 glaciers that carry as much as 12,000 cubic kilometers of ice down the mountains. The water they provide is a lifeline for more than 2.5 billion people, flowing through circuitous paths of the Indus, the Ganges, the Brahmaputra, the Mekong, the Yangtze and the Huang He (Yellow River). While these mountains span geographic boundaries across India, Nepal, China, Bhutan, and Pakistan, sovereign states have sought to territorialize the land, the water, the air, the ecosystems, and the people. The climate crisis has exacerbated regional tensions because as the Himalayas melt and their water sources diminish, a race to secure access to fresh water is quickly turning into competition. This talk will explain how the Himalayan Melting Mountains brought together a group of students, alumni, and faculty to launch an interdisciplinary initiative that spotlights the urgent call to action necessitated by a problem that should be driving the conversation in Asia. Our run-away carbon footprint combined with increasingly fraught power relations constitute an explosive cocktail that will destabilize the lives and welfare of billions of people with massive spill-over effects across the globe.

The decarbonization of the global economy in response to the climate crisis and the fourth industrial revolution, featuring artificial intelligence (AI) and 5G networks (accelerated in response to the coronavirus pandemic), has triggered a race to secure uninterrupted access to critical raw minerals (CRMs) that are indispensable inputs for high-technology applications. Access to necessary resources has become a strategic security question, in light of the projected rapid increase in global demand for these essential inputs. This conference is divided into four sessions, including discussions on geopolitics, views from the industry, and insights on the social and environmental impacts. 

2021 finds us in the midst of a pandemic and a growing appreciation that the climate crisis is the biggest challenge of our time. Plans to become carbon neutral by mid-century have been announced by major economies making decarbonization urgent.  This major transformation requires unprecedented amounts of minerals as inputs and some are considered especially critical. Which ones are they? What makes them critical? Chris Berry President of House Mountain Partners, LLC and Sophia Kalantzakos, Professor at New York University/ NYU Abu Dhabi will be talking about these developments. They will discuss the complex series of challenges and opportunities that are emerging as countries around the world move to decarbonize their economies in line with their Paris commitments. . 

This conference was organized by  The Geopolitics and Ecology of Himalayan Water – under the eARThumanities at NYU Abu Dhabi in collaboration with the Rachel Carson Center of LMU Munich. It aspires to bring together the expertise of scholars, practitioners, and policymakers in order to elicit a synthetic and holistic approach in studying and proposing solutions to this looming crisis.

The conference highlights has been provided to your right. 

Arlit is a case study in environmental racism set in a uranium mining town in the Sahara desert of Niger. Here European corporations extract nuclear power and profits leaving behind disease, contamination and unemployment. Ironically the primary activities of Arlit today is to die of radiation related sicknesses or to emigrate to find work in Europe itself.

Presented by Awam Amkpa, and followed by a Q&A with filmmaker Idrissou Mora-Kpai  

In the one hundred years or so since the birth of the Middle Eastern oil industry petroleum saturates its societies, cultures and politics, fueling cars, airplanes and wars, supplying energy for fridges, fans and air conditioners, creating glitzy modern cities, and subverting man made landscapes and natural environments. Oil’s miracles, spectacles and miseries are still with us, and will remain for some time to come. This multidisciplinary workshop penetrates the bituminous layers of the inner life of Middle Eastern oil, exploring how it affectes people’s social, cultural and political lives in the twentieth and twentieth-first centuries.

Convened by
Nelida Fuccaro, Professor of Middle Eastern History; Associate Dean of Humanities, NYUAD
Mandana Limbert, Associate Professor of Anthropology, CUNY:Queens College

Hosted by
NYU Abu Dhabi Institute 

Award winning filmmaker Christopher Quinn is visiting NYUAD during the first week of April. During his stay his movie Eating Animals will be screened followed by a Q&A with Christopher Quinn.  Eating Animals is based on the book by Jonathan Safran Foer and narrated by Natalie Portman.  

Screening followed by Q&A with the film’s director Christopher Dillon Quinn

[Director: Christopher Dillon Quinn | USA | 2017 | 95 mins | English]

This talk explores the recent proliferation of studies on the plant-people relationship in ancient Central Asia.  Over the last 25 years, significant data sets of ancient plant remains and other dietary indicators have emerged from major and minor archaeological sites across the region.  Many of the studies that have produced these data pursue a wide-ranging picture of the transmission of domesticated plants across cultures and emphasize the role of the Silk Road in shaping food globalization in prehistory.  Contrasting these are other studies that examine the local, embedded, and indigenous facets of ancient plant usage and domestication within Central Asia itself.  Both perspectives capture fascinating aspects of ancient human-environment dynamics in Central Asia using novel approaches.  They also mirror contemporary discourse about globalization and its implications for human societies.  This talk will explore these bodies of emerging scholarship and present information on new research in Central Asia aimed at addressing some of the recent trends.

Elizabeth Brite is a clinical assistant professor in the Honors College, Purdue University.  She is also co-director of the Khorezm Ancient Agriculture Project in Karakalpakstan, Uzbekistan.  Dr. Brite received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California, Los Anegeles in 2011.

In 2018, the eARThumanities officially launched its collaboration with the renowned Rachel Carson Center of Munich’s Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität. An international, interdisciplinary center for research and education in the environmental humanities and social sciences, the Rachel Carson Center and eARTHumanities, NYUAD jointly organized a workshop on February 18-19, 2018 entitled “Transformations in Environment and Society.” Rachel Carson Fellows from all over the world discussed their work with NYUAD faculty and members of NYUs GNU on topics that ranged from music, poetry, and novels to include theater, art, migration, disaster relief, dessert landscapes and histories, the Belt and Road Initiative and the Green Wall of China.