A Climate Symposium:
Landscapes on the Edge

Speakers from the wider Los Angeles basin focusing on climate history, public policy, activism, environmental justice and ecological conservation will convene to discuss the contemporary landscape as it is changed by climate imbalance. The symposium begins chronologically with the history of human-made climate change, via a special keynote foundational talk by Veerabhadran “Ram” Ramanathan, who discovered the greenhouse effect of chlorofluorocarbons in 1975 and made critical contributions to the discourse of Global Warming, garnering the Blue Planet Prize.

Further speakers will trace causes to the present-day effects of climate change and discuss future educational, activist, mitigation and adaptation strategies. These condensed visual presentations by Edward Barbier, Rong Fu, Peter Kalmus, Alesia Montgomery, Mark Stoll, Aradhna Tripati, Bharat Jayram Venkat, and Justin Winters will be followed by panel discussions and audience questions. The speakers have engaged in a range of experiences, such as Edward Barbier crafting the original Green New Deal for COP and Justin Winters orchestrating the creation of the Global Safety Net.

This symposium addresses themes brought forward by the exhibition Josh Kline: Climate Change, curated by Rebecca Lowery, including the impacts of geography, capitalism, and chaotic weather on global and local communities. While Kline’s work is explicitly science-fiction, this afternoon of talks will present an opportunity to hear from experts working in the field and to engage with science and facts. The program is moderated by artist and MOCA Environmental Council co-founder Haley Mellin. Josh Kline will join for group discussions at the end of each section of the program.

Attendees may join any or all sections, and are encouraged to RSVP. The exhibition Josh Kline: Climate Change will be on view during the symposium with free admission

Schedule
Session 1: Causes
12-1:30 pm
Keynote Talk:
Ram Ramanathan

Session 2: Effects
1:45-3:00 pm
Rong Fu
Alesia Montgomery
Mark Stoll
Dr. Bharat Jayram Venkat

Session 3: Strategies
3:20-5 pm
Edward Barbier
Peter Kalmus
Aradhna Tripati
Justin Winters

This program was co-organized by artists Haley Mellin and Josh Kline, with Kelsey Shell, Environmental & Sustainability Strategist, and Alitzah Oros, Public Programming Associate, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Highlighting the museum’s work around climate, conservation, and environmental justice, MOCA’s environmental programs are guided by the work of the MOCA Environmental Council, the first sustainability council at a major arts museum in the United States. The environmental programs present artists, activists, and scholars committed to critical ecological issues in Los Angeles and globally.

The 2024 MOCA Climate Conversations are made possible by Nora McNeely Hurley and Manitou Fund.

Edward B. Barbier is a University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Economics, Colorado State University and a Senior Scholar in the School of Global Environmental Sustainability. His main expertise is environmental and resource economics as well as international environmental policy. He has consulted for a variety of national, international and non-governmental agencies, including many UN organizations, the World Bank and the OECD. He has authored over 350 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, written or edited 27 books, and published in popular journals and social media. Barbier is a Fellow of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists and is a highly cited scholar on global environmental and sustainability issues. His latest book is the award-winning Economics for a Fragile Planet, Cambridge University Press.

Rong Fu is a climate researcher and a professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, and the Director of the Joint Institute for Earth System Science and Engineering at University of California, Los Angeles. Her research focuses on the mechanisms that control droughts, rainfall seasonality and variability over Amazonian and North American regions, and how changes of global climate, local vegetation and biomass burning, and oceanic decadal variability have influenced these processes in the recent past and will influence rainfall seasonality and droughts in the future. She has also developed a drought early warning for US Great Plains working with regional water resource managers. Her research is among the earliest to observationally uncover significant roles of tropical rainforests in determining rainfall seasonality over Amazonia and Tibetan Plateau in determining water vapor transport to global stratosphere.

She received NSF CAREER and NASA New Investigator Awards, and the American Meteorological Society (AMS) Outstanding Achievement Award for biometeorology. She is also an elected fellow of the AMS, the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and the American Association For the Advancement of Science (AAAS), respectively. She is an elected council member of the AMS, was the former President of the Global Environmental Change Section (2015-2016) and a member of the Leadership Team of the AGU and the Chair of the AAAS Atmosphere and Hydrosphere (2022). She has served on many national and international panels, such as the National Research Council special committees on “Abrupt Impact of Climate Change” and “Landscapes on the edge”, the Climate Working Group for NOAA Science Advisory Board. She is a co-leader of the NOAA Drought Task Force Phase IV and an Editor of Journal of Geophysical Research – Atmosphere, the editor of the Climate and Climate Change Section, the 3rd Edition of the Encyclopedia of Atmospheric Sciences, and the editor of the Water Cycle and Land-Atmospheric Interaction Section of the 2nd Edition of the Encyclopedia of Climate System Science.

Dr. Peter Kalmus is a climate scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory speaking on his own behalf. He is the recipient of NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal, and NASA’s Early Career Achievement Medal. He was included in Forbes’ inaugural list of 50 global sustainability leaders in 2024. Peter has a B.Sc. in physics from Harvard and a Ph.D. in physics from Columbia, and began his research career as an astrophysicist leading searches for gravitational waves with the LIGO collaboration. His research interests include ascertaining impact from future extreme heat on humans and ecosystems.

Born and raised in South Los Angeles, Alesia Montgomery is an Assistant Professor at UCLA’s Institute of Environment and Sustainability (IoES). An ethnographer, Montgomery studies the social and environmental justice concerns of low-income, racialized communities. Her book, Greening the Black Urban Regime: The Culture and Commerce of Sustainability in Detroit, focuses on battles over the aims and strategies of green redevelopment. Her current research centers on the challenges of Black and Latina mothers who strive to protect their families from extreme heat in South LA. The deadly heat that threatens racialized communities is a product of overlapping disasters: climate change, which is making extreme heat events (EHEs) more frequent and severe, and discriminatory policies (e.g., substandard housing, inequitable access to parks) that limit thermal regulation. As higher temperatures become the new normal around the world, it is important to consider the contexts and burdens of mothers and other caregivers who care for the most vulnerable populations--the very young and the very old. The scope of needs may “burn out” caregivers, which may endanger themselves and those who depend on them.

Climate leader Dr. Veerabhadran “Ram” Ramanathan discovered the greenhouse effect of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in 1975, proposing the now-accepted fact that non-CO2 gases also contribute significantly to planetary warming. In 1980, he predicted that global warming would be detectable by 2000, a prediction that was verified by the IPCC in 2001. In 2016, he predicted that the planetary warming will exceed the unprecedented warming of 1.5 C by 2030. His work has informed numerous global policies, including formation of the United Nations’ Climate and Clean Air Coalition, which seeks to reduce the pollutants methane, black carbon soot, lower-atmosphere ozone smog and hydrofluorocarbon refrigerants – which together have trapped almost half the heat that causes global warming. As member of the executive council of the Pontifical academy of sciences, he advises the Vatican, including Pope Francis, on the climate crisis.

Veerabhadran is now currently embarked on a global effort to make people and the planet climate resilient. Towards this goal, he co-organized a Vatican summit in 2024 for Governors and Mayors from around the world and released a Planetary Call to Action for Climate Resilience signed by Pope Francis and many Governors including Governor of NewYork. Teaming up with the California Governor's office, he has formed a new project called: Climate Resilient California and Californians. He has received numerous honors including: United Nations Champion of Earth; Blue Planet Prize; Volvo Environment Prize; and election to the US National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Ram was science advisor to Pope Francis’ delegation to the Paris Climate Summit; and now co-leads a Vatican science academy initiative on global Climate Resilience.

Mark Stoll is Professor of Environmental History at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas. His latest book, Profit: An Environmental History (Polity, 2023), tells the long story of the mounting ecological toll that capitalism has exacted. Stoll’s earlier work explored unintended ways that religious belief has shaped ideas about nature and the environment. This line of research culminated in his book Inherit the Holy Mountain: Religion and the Rise of American Environmentalism (Oxford U.P., 2015), which explores the religious and cultural roots of modern environmentalism. Throughout his career, Stoll has investigated how the same cultural and social forces that caused the environmental crisis also fostered an environmental movement. Stoll’s books, articles, and essays have been widely praised and translated.

Aradhna Tripati researches and teaches about climate change; the history and dynamics of changing Earth systems including climate, ice sheets, oceans, the water cycle, carbon dioxide levels; tool development; and clumped isotope geochemistry. She is Professor in the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability (IoES), the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, the Department of Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences, the Institute for Geophysics and Planetary Physics (IGPP), and the California Nanosystems Institute (CNSI), as her work is highly interdisciplinary.

Aradhna received her Ph.D. in Earth Sciences at UC Santa Cruz where she was a Gates Millennium Scholar, an Ocean Drilling Program Fellow, and a UC Regents’ Fellow – and she received the Aaron Waters Award for Best Thesis Proposal. She was a research fellow at the University of Cambridge where she held the Thomas Nevile Fellowship in Natural Sciences, a Comer Abrupt Climate Change Fellowship, a National Environmental Research Council Fellowship, and a Marshall Sherfield Fellowship. Aradhna also was a visiting scientist at the California Institute of Technology for several years. She began as an assistant professor at UCLA in 2009 and received tenure in 2014.

Dr. Bharat Jayram Venkat is an Associate Professor at UCLA with a joint appointment spanning the Institute for Society & Genetics, the Department of History, and the Department of Anthropology. His first book, At the Limits of Cure (Duke University Press, 2021; Bloomsbury India, 2022), is the winner of three awards: the RAI Wellcome Medal (from the Royal Anthropological Institute and the Wellcome Trust), the Edie Turner Book Prize for Ethnographic Writing (from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology), and the Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences (from the American Institute of Indian Studies). His current book project—titled "Swelter: A History of Our Bodies in a Warming World"— is about thermal inequality, the history of heat, and the fate of our bodies in a swiftly warming world riven by inequality. This book reflects on the existential and planetary crisis posed by extreme heat, but from the perspective of our bodies as they experience this crisis. Swelter will be published by Crown in the United States, and Picador in the United Kingdom. Dr. Venkat is also the founding director of the UCLA Heat Lab. His work has been funded by the American Council for Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the American Institute for Indian Studies, and most recently, by a five-year National Science Foundation (NSF) Career Award, which is the NSF’s most prestigious award in support of early-career faculty.

Justin Winters is the Co-founder and Executive Director of One Earth, a nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering everyone, everywhere, with the knowledge, inspiration, and opportunity to heal the Earth and reclaim our future. One Earth’s groundbreaking science proves that it’s possible to solve the twin crises of climate change and biodiversity loss through three pillars of collective action - renewable energy, nature conservation, and regenerative agriculture. They make this knowledge accessible through educational content, inspiring storytelling, and innovative digital tools that give people the opportunity to drive change across the Earth’s 185 Bioregions.

Prior to One Earth, Justin served as Executive Director of the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, where she helped Leonardo reshape his approach to philanthropy and activism, leveraging his position as a global figure to influence decision-makers and the public on the most pressing environmental issues. Justin built the organization’s grant-making program, which awarded over $100 million in grants across 60 countries and created a series of innovative philanthropic funds. She also led the global communications platform, growing its digital media community to 80 million followers and generating approximately 4.2. billion social and online media impressions per year. Through her collaborative, inclusive, and entrepreneurial approach, Justin is building a broad public movement of engaged and inspired changemakers who, together, will help solve the climate crisis and build a vibrant, just future for us all.

Dr. Haley Mellin is an artist focusing on painting and land conservation. Her work is observational and unfolds on-site outside. The paintings are made from gouache – a non-toxic, water-based material. Her recent solo exhibitions include Dittrich & Schlechtriem, Berlin (2024): Giovanni's Room, Los Angeles (2023); and The Journal Gallery, New York (2022) and recent group exhibitions include Hauser & Wirth, New York (2024), Micki Meng and Parker Gallery (2023); and Blanc Gallery (2023). Haley earned a PhD in Visual Culture and Education from N.Y.U. Steinhardt and a Bachelor of Arts in Painting and Education from U.C. Berkeley. She has taught at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum, the MoMA, The Studio Museum in Harlem and the Harvard Kennedy School of Public Policy.

Haley is the Founder and Director of Art into Acres, an artist-run non-profit dedicated to supporting permanent large-scale land conservation on behalf of the arts community. The initiative has supported millions of acres of new permanent designation projects in the form of Indigenous protected areas and National Parks. The locations are selected because of their biodiversity significance alongside and their local history of community-led advocacy efforts. To advance the sustainability of the art community, Mellin co-founded Conserve.org, Art + Climate Action, Artists Commit, GCC Los Angeles, and GCC New York and conducted the inaugural carbon emissions calculations for most major U.S. and European museums supported by grants from the Teiger Foundation. She is co-founder and co-chair of the Environmental Council here at MOCA.

Josh Kline works in installation, video, sculpture, and photography. His large-scale solo exhibition, currently on view at MOCA Grand Avenue, brings together all of his work about the climate crisis, produced over the last six years. In his art, Kline questions how emergent technologies are being used to change human life in the 21st Century. At its core, Kline’s practice is focused on work and class, exploring how today’s most urgent social and political issues – climate change, automation, disease, and the weakening of democracy – impact the people who make up the labor force.

In 2024, Kline opened solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (until January 5, 2025) and at Lisson Gallery, New York; and was included in the 24th Biennale of Sydney and the 8th Yokohama Triennial. In 2023 the Whitney Museum of American Art presented the first major U.S. museum survey of his work. Kline’s art has been widely exhibited in the United States and internationally, in exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, the New Museum, and MoMA PS1 in New York; The Hirshhorn Museum and The National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C.; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; LAXART, Los Angeles; ICA Boston; ICA Philadelphia; MOCA Cleveland; Portland Art Museum; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; KW, Berlin; Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel; Modern Art Oxford, UK; Yuz Museum, Shanghai; Louisiana Museum, Denmark; and MCAD Manila, Philippines, among many others.