SFI Community Lecture 'Climate Change And Contagion: Complex Crises Past And Present' June 18

SFI Community Lecture ‘Climate Change And Contagion: Complex Crises Past And Present’ June 18

Submitted by Carol A. Clark
on June 18, 2025
- 7:27 am

Image: detail “Ice Harvest” Maurice Cullen. Oil on canvas. 1914. Source: Montréal Museum of Fine Arts. Courtesy/SFI

SFI News:

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.

The lecture will begin at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday, June 18, at the Lensic Performing Arts Center. Kyle Harper will be signing copies of his book, Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History in the Lensic Lobby in advance of this lecture, starting at 6:30 pm.

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 an historical perspective. Courtesy photo

SFI’s Community Lecture Series

Reserve your free tickets through The Lensic Box Office online or call 505.988.1234. Santa Fe residents are encouraged to attend in person. This lecture will be streaming from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and our YouTube page.

This lecture is presented at no cost to the public thanks to generous sponsorship from the McKinnon Family Foundation, with additional support provided by The Lensic Performing Arts Center and the Santa Fe Reporter.

Click here for more information about SFI’s Community Lecture Series.