David Carpenter: "Science for the People"
2023-03-19 14:00 - 17:00 (America/New_York) | The Sanctuary, 3361 6th Ave, Troy, 12180, United States
Join us for a celebration of SUNY Albany Professor David Carpenter’s long career as an environmental advocate! We’ll be gathering with Dr. Carpenter along with some of his graduate students and colleagues, as well as representatives of some of the many grassroots organizations who have worked with David over his decades-long career. Dr. Carpenter will speak, along with former EPA Region 2 administrator Judith Enck and other local luminaries. We’ll hear an update on the ongoing legal case surrounding Monsanto’s pollution of the St. Regis Mohawk Reservation, and other local environmental struggles. But mostly we’re gathering to acknowledge a true hero of the environmental justice movement!

The celebration will close with a free community meal of soup and cake. This is a zero waste event–bring your own reusable plate, utensils, cup and napkin!

Co-sponsored by NATURE Lab, United University Professions- Albany Chapter, Beyond Plastics, Clean Air Coalition of Greater Ravena-Coeymans, Rensselaer Environmental Coalition, PAUSE, Green Education & Legal Fund, UNCAGED, Environmental Advocates NY, Riverkeeper, NYPIRG, Lights Out Norlite, Healthy Schools Network, Community Advocates for a Sustainable Environment, Stop NY Fracked Gas Pipeline, Zero Waste Capital District, Housatonic River Initiative, Inc, and Housatonic Environmental Action League, Inc.

Download the flyer here.

Masks are encouraged and will be available at this event. If you are feeling unwell or have any symptoms of illness please stay home and rest.

Judith Enck and Dr. David Carpenter at Dunn Landfill

David Carpenter is a public health physician whose current position is Director of the Institute for Health and the Environment at the University at Albany, as well as Professor of Environmental Health Sciences within the School of Public Health at the University at Albany. After receiving his MD degree from Harvard Medical School he chose a career of research and public health. After research positions at the National Institute of Mental Health and the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute, he came to Albany in 1980 as the Director of the Wadsworth Center for Laboratories and Research of the New York State Department of Health, the third largest public health laboratory in the US after NIH and CDC. In an effort to build ties to an academic program, he initiated efforts to create a partnership between the New York State Department of Health and the University at Albany, resulting in the creation of the School of Public Health in 1985. He was then appointed as the founding Dean of the School of Public Health, a position he held until 1998 when he became the Director of the Institute of Health and the Environment. In 2011 the Institute for Health and the Environment was declared a Collaborating Centre of the World Health Organization in Environmental Health. While his early research was study of animal and cellular models of brain function, his more recent studies have focused on environmental causes of human disease. He has more than 485 peer-reviewed publications.

Photos from the event

By Robert Cooper

photograph by Caroline Tennant

Author Joshua Frank presents "Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America"
2023-03-25 19:00 - 21:00
Join us for an in-person book talk with Joshua Frank author of Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America. The 2022 book (Haymarket Books) examines the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State, which once was home to the United States’ largest plutonium production site.

“In the context of renewed support for atomic power as a means of combating climate change, Atomic Days provides a much-needed refutation of the myths of nuclear technology—from weapons to electricity—and shines a spotlight on the ravages of Hanford and its threat to communities, workers and the global environment.”

About the Book

The Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State is laced with 56 million gallons of radioactive waste. The threat of an explosive accident at Hanford is all too real—an event that could be more catastrophic than Chernobyl.

The EPA designated Hanford the most toxic place in America; it is also the most expensive environmental clean-up job the world has ever seen, with a $677 billion price tag that keeps growing. Huge underground tanks, well past their life expectancy and full of boiling radioactive gunk, are leaking, infecting groundwater supplies and threatening the Columbia River.

Whistleblowers, worried that the worst is ahead, are now speaking out, begging to be heard and hoping their pleas help bring attention to the dire situation at Hanford. Aside from a few feisty community groups and handful of Indigenous activists, there is very little public scrutiny of the clean-up process, which is managed by the Department of Energy and carried out by contractors with shoddy track records, like Bechtel. In the context of renewed support for atomic power as a means of combating climate change, Atomic Days provides a much-needed refutation of the myths of nuclear technology—from weapons to electricity—and shines a spotlight on the ravages of Hanford and its threat to communities, workers and the global environment.

Joshua Frank is an award-winning California-based journalist and co-editor of the political magazine CounterPunch. He is the editor and co-author of several books. Most recently, he is the author of the book Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America (Haymarket Books 2022).

"Rooted in Independent Media, Growing Toward a Just Future" with Amy Goodman
2023-04-22 19:00 - 21:30
Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! comes to the Sanctuary stage for the second night of our weekend celebration Rooted in Independent Media, Growing Toward a Just Future! Join us on Saturday, April 22, for a conversation about the role and future of independent media, followed by a conversation about stories over the past two decades building the Sanctuary’s campus with outgoing Executive Director Steve Pierce. They will be joined by Hudson Mohawk Magazine’s Willie Terry and moderator KP Holler, the Executive Director of Media Alliance.

Rooted in Independent Media, Growing Toward a Just Future! is a weekend celebrating the contributions of Steve Pierce to the Sanctuary’s legacy.

Co-sponsored by: Women Against War.

*Masking is mandatory for this event

“Rooted in Independent Media, Growing Toward a Just Future” Sanctuary Weekend Celebration!

Join us for a weekend celebrating this historic time at the Sanctuary, starting with a night of amazing music by Taína Asili and Eljuri and ending the following night with a presentation by Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman! During this weekend celebration, each evening will include refreshments and reflections from friends old and new about how the Sanctuary (and Steve) has made an impact on them!

It seems incredible but, thanks to Steve’s leadership, we owe just $25,000 left to pay off the complete mortgage for our entire Sanctuary campus! This includes four buildings — the Sanctuary with presentation venue, live production, radio and video studios; NATURE Lab with a level-1 Biology Laboratory and Peoples Health Sanctuary, the NATURE Lab Residency House, the Carriage House, plus Collard City Growers Gardens’ four lots and our outdoor community presentation space Freedom Square!

Your contribution, of any size, would greatly contribute to the impact of our organization by helping us move into the future with a new Executive Director with our goal of being fully debt free!

See all ticket options here.No one will be turned away for a lack of funds

Photos by Robert Cooper

Amy Goodman is the host and executive producer of Democracy Now!, a national, daily, independent, award-winning news program airing on over 1,400 public television and radio stations worldwide.

The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard honored Goodman with the 2014 I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence Lifetime Achievement Award. She is also the first journalist to receive the Right Livelihood Award, widely known as the ‘Alternative Nobel Prize’ for “developing an innovative model of truly independent grassroots political journalism that brings to millions of people the alternative voices that are often excluded by the mainstream media.” She is the first co-recipient of the Park Center for Independent Media’s Izzy Award, named for the great muckraking journalist I.F. Stone, and was later selected for induction into the Park Center’s I.F. Stone Hall of Fame. The Independent of London called Amy Goodman and Democracy Now! “an inspiration.”

Goodman has co-authored six New York Times bestsellers. Her latest, Democracy Now!: Twenty Years Covering the Movements Changing America, looks back over the past two decades of Democracy Now! and the powerful movements and charismatic leaders who are re-shaping our world. Before than, The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupations, Resistance, and Hope, and Breaking the Sound Barrier, both written with Denis Moynihan, give voice to the many ordinary people standing up to corporate and government power. She co-authored her first three bestsellers with her brother, journalist David Goodman: Standing Up to the Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary Times (2008), Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders, and the People Who Fight Back (2006) and The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media That Love Them (2004). She co-writes a weekly column with Denis Moynihan (also produced as an audio podcast) syndicated by King Features, for which she was recognized in 2007 with the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Reporting.

Goodman has received the Society for Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi Award for Excellence; American Women in Radio and Television Gracie Award; the Paley Center for Media’s She’s Made It Award; and the Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship. Her reporting on East Timor and Nigeria has won numerous awards, including the George Polk Award, Robert F. Kennedy Prize for International Reporting, and the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Award. Time Magazine named Democracy Now! its “Pick of the Podcasts,” along with NBC’s Meet the Press. PULSE named Goodman one of the 20 Top Global Media Figures of 2009.

She has also received awards from the Associated Press, United Press International, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and Project Censored. Goodman received the first ever Communication for Peace Award from the World Association for Christian Communication. She was also honored by the National Council of Teachers of English with the George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language.

Indigenous Lens on Media Making
2023-10-03 19:00 - 21:00 | The Sanctuary, 3361 6th Ave, Troy, 12180, United States
Kahstoserakwathe Paulette Moore, co-owner of The Aunties Dandelion media organization, transformed her work in mainstream media to her present focus on revitalizing communities through stories of land, language, and relationships. Join us for a conversation where Moore explores how and why The Aunties Dandelion uses an Indigenous lens to create media.

This event is organized by Hudson Mohawk Magazine and is co-sponsored by the MDOCS Co-Creation Initiative, Skidmore College and is part of the Sanctuary Eco-Art Trail project, funded by a National Endowment for the Arts Our Town creative placemaking grant, connecting Indigenous legacy to an urban nature walk on 6th Avenue.

The Aunties Dandelion is a media arts organization and a transformative space informed by traditional Onkwehon:we (original peoples’) teachings. They are a collective of storytellers who are co-creating and revitalizing an expansive global community through stories of land, language and relationships.​ The Aunties Dandelion recently completed their 30th podcast episode and wrapped shooting on their short film VESS – about a Kanyenkehà:ka (Mohawk) philosopher and carpenter who is working through the loss of family as he builds a home for a young family returning to the Rez.

Kahstoserakwathe Paulette Moore (Kanyen’kehà:ka) is a long-time documentary and independent filmmaker, podcaster, and educator. Moore is a fluent Kanyen’kè:ha speaker (ACTFL intermediate/high), and an enrolled member of Six Nations of the Grand River territory. She spent two decades in Washington, DC as producer/director/writer with Discovery Channel, National Geographic, and others. Moore is a founding member/co-owner of The Aunties Dandelion.

MediaSanctuary · Indigenous Lens On Media Making

"Black Matrilineage, Photography, and Representation" Book Talk & Discussion
2023-10-14 19:00 - 21:00 | The Sanctuary, 3361 6th Ave, Troy, 12180, United States
Join us for a conversation around the book Black Matrilineage, Photography, and Representation, edited by Lesly Deschler Canossi and Zoraida Lopez-Diago, the duo that makes up Women Picturing Revolution. They will present their book before a discussion with local photographer and doula Jayana LaFountaine and ending with a Q&A with the audience.

5:00pm-6:00pm: Join Jayana LaFountaine for a photography-based workshop around our identities and lineage in Who’s On Your Face?

6:00pm-7:00pm: Community Meal

7:00pm-9:00pm: A discussion around Black motherhood and representations of it in photography, centered around the book Black Matrilineage, Photography, and Representation

About the book:

Black Matrilineage, Photography, and Representation questions how the Black female body, specifically the Black maternal body, navigates interlocking structures that place a false narrative on her body and that of her maternal ancestors. Drawing on a wide range of scholarly inquiry and contemporary art, this book addresses these misconceptions and fills in the gaps that exist in the photographic representation of Black motherhood, mothering, and mutual care within Black communities.

The essays and interviews, paired with a curated selection of images, address the complicated relationship between Blackness and photography and in particular its gendered dimension, its relationship to health, sexuality, and digital culture – primarily in the context of racialized heteronormativity. This collection, then, challenges racist images and discourses, both historically and in its persistence in contemporary society, while reclaiming the innate brilliance of Black women through personal stories, history, political acts, connections to place, moments of pleasure, and communal celebration.

This visual exploration of Black motherhood through pictures made by Black woman–identifying photographers thus serves as a reflection of the past and a portal to the future and contributes to recent scholarship on the complexity of Black life and Black joy.

Photography, revolution, representation. Through leading seminars, curating panels, and consulting services, Women Picturing Revolution (WPR) co-creators Lesly Deschler Canossi and Zoraida Lopez-Diago are reclaiming and retelling history in a manner that is both radical and necessary. By highlighting the work of woman photographers who have documented conflicts, crises, and revolutions in private realms and public spaces, WPR sheds light on personal and political experiences that are often overlooked or underrepresented. From images made as a response to forced silence, oppression, and the inability to act, to well-known visual journalists documenting upheaval, Lesly and Zoraida, along with WPR participants, examine not only the photographs but also the conditions under which women make images.

Jayana LaFountaine is an Afro-Latina portrait photographer and birth Doula based in Troy, New York. Her work focuses on vulnerability and the preservation of legacy through photo documentation and birth work. As a former foster youth with an adverse childhood she understands the importance of creating strong familial connections through this work. She does this work with Black and Brown folks at the forefront. Photography is a means for her to heal while creating a better reality outside of abuse and trauma. Birth work is her birth right as she is a 4th generation birthworker.

EVENT PHOTOS:

FEMeeting Sister Labs: Artist Presentations
2024-04-05 19:00 - 21:30 | The Sanctuary, 3361 6th Ave, Troy, 12180, United States
Join FEMeeting Sister Labs, a conference bringing together women in art, science and technology, for two days of speakers, workshops, and community activities. NATURE Lab hosts FEMeeting Sister Labs right here in North Central Troy, NY, welcoming local and international artists, scholars, students and community members. All are welcome for this exciting weekend of events!

Schedule:April 5, 7 pm – 9:30 pm: An Evening of Radical Women’s Voices in Art, Science and Technology

Suzanne Thorpe and Stephanie Rothenberg: Tending Ostreidae: Serenades for Settling celebrates the listening body of the heroic oyster. Whereas other marine animals use chemical exudates or patterns of light, oysters determine suitable settlement habitats through a distinction of sound signatures in underwater soundscapes. They are also sensitive to loud sounds at certain pitches, which potentially disturbs their reproductive process.

Cecilia Vilca: Exorcisms of the Territory. This Lecture-Exorcism, delivered by Cecilia Vilca, invokes texts that draw a conversation of times, and a history that heals itself.

Praba Pilar: Nixtamalízaté-té-té. Praba Pilar will share her convivial project Nixtamalízaté-té-té, which subverts emergent AI systems into fellow travelers, into beautiful pluriversal monsters.

Thorpe and Rothenberg: Tending Ostreidae

Praba Pilar

Cecilia Vilca

April 6, 9am – 2pm: Workshops

NATURE Lab Workshop: Community Science in N. Central Troy with Kathy High, Sarah Cadieux, Ellie Irons, Azuré Keahi, Abby Kinchy, A’Livija Mullins-Richard, and Emilly Obuya.

Sanctuary Eco-Art Trail, walk with Ellie Irons, Kathy High, Azuré Keahi, Branda Miller

L Lot Workshop: AilanthusXYucca, with Azuré Keahi and Ellie Irons

FEMeeting is driven by the desire to develop and promote a more direct collaboration between women working at the intersection art, science, and technology. The conference aims to disseminate projects being undertaken by women worldwide and, as a result, to contribute to the development of art-science research methodologies and to the growth of cooperation strategies that can increase knowledge sharing and bring communities closer.

More about the Presenters on April 5:

Cecilia Vilca Ocharan is a Peruvian transartist, feminist chola techno-witch, and language activist. She is a founding member of the creative and digital heritage division, MyAP Electron Microscopy Laboratory. From a decolonizing vision, she exercises her epistemological rebellion using technology as a tool and object of analysis. Her main goal and poetics are to encourage reflection through revelation. Her projects are born from her personal crusades, and therefore, they are micropolitical flesh. ISEA2020 Montreal and ISEA2023 Paris IPC Member. FEMeeting 2023 Taos and TTT2023 Malta Scientific & Artistic Committee member. Journal of Science and Technology of the Arts (CITAR) Reviewer. Eight Art Residency Programs: Mexico, Bolivia, USA, and Canada. She has exhibited her work, organized exhibitions, and given lectures in Peru, Mexico, Bolivia, Argentina, Spain, Cuba, Chile, Norway, Colombia, Brazil, South Africa, Australia, Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Austria, and the USA. Born, lives and dreams in/from Lima, Peru, she has a M.A. Digital Arts, UPF, BCN, Spain.

Praba Pilar is a diasporic Colombian artist disrupting the overwhelmingly passive participation in the contemporary ‘cult of the techno-logic.’ Over the last two decades Pilar has presented cultural productions integrating performance art, live work, digital works, video, electronic installations, radio programming, street theatre, invisible theatre, websites and writing. These projects have traveled widely to museums, galleries, universities, performance festivals, conferences, public streets, political meetings, bookstores, bars, and radio airwaves around the world. Check out Praba Pilar’s website here.

Suzanne Thorpe is an interdisciplinary artist-scholar whose creative research intersects electronic music, feminist and ecological theory. She interweaves critical listening practices with acoustic ecology, improvisation and technology to craft immersive sound engagements and creative research sites that question circulations of power within human and nonhuman systems. As an electroacoustic flutist and sound artist she’s performed and exhibited internationally, has a large discography, with releases on Columbia Records, Beggars Banquet, Geffin, V2, and her research has been published in journals and edited volumes. Thorpe has been granted several residencies and awards for her artistry and research, such as the Frog Peak Collective Award for innovative research in technology, a Gold Record from the Recording Industry Association of Americas, as well as grants from the MAP Fund, NYSCA, New Music USA and Harvestworks Digital Media Foundation. Thorpe holds an MFA in Electronic Music & Media from Mills College, a Ph.D. in Integrative Studies from the University of California, San Diego, and is a certified Deep Listening Instructor, having studied in depth with pioneering composer and Deep Listening Founder Pauline Oliveros. Most recently she was a Mellon Fellow and member of the Society of Fellows at Columbia University, and is currently Assistant Professor of Sound Studies at Manhattan College. She also remains a co-founder and director of TECHNE, a nonprofit arts-education organization dedicated to dismantling social and cultural barriers in technical learning environments.

Stephanie Rothenberg’s interdisciplinary art draws from digital culture, science and economics to explore symbiotic relationships between human designed systems and biological ecosystems. Moving between real and virtual spaces, she engages a variety of media platforms that include interactive installation, drawing, sculpture, video and performance. She has exhibited internationally in venues and festivals including MassMOCA (US), Sundance Film Festival (US), House of Electronic Arts / HeK (CH), LABoral (ES), Transmediale (DE), and ZKM Center for Art & Media (DE). She has received awards from Harpo Foundation, NYSCA and Creative Capital among others and has participated in numerous residencies including Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace/LMCC and Eyebeam Art and Technology Center in NYC, Santa Fe Art Institute, and ZK/U in Berlin. Her work is in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art and has been widely reviewed including Artforum, Artnet, The Brooklyn Rail and Hyperallergic. She is Professor in the Department of Art at University at Buffalo SUNY where she co-directs an interdisciplinary design studio collaborating with local social justice organizations.

More about FEMeeting and Sister Labs

Launched in 2017, the conference “FEMeeting: Women in Art, Science and Technology” was driven by the desire to develop and promote more direct collaboration between individuals who identify themselves as Women, independently of their sex. The idea behind FEMeeting was orchestrated by the Portuguese artist Marta de Menezes and scholar Dalila Honorato, after realizing that women in the field of Art and Science have an unquestionable presence worldwide.

In 2021, FEMeeting Sister Labs launched as an hybrid model of interaction between local and global, between digital and physical: where FEMeeting members address to the community of women in art, science and technology an invitation to their lab spaces.

Discover the lab spaces already presented by FEMeeting members through Sister Labs and learn more about the community of women in art, science and technology! Check out Sister Lab around the World!

We are particularly interested in hearing about the experiences of BIPOC, trans women, non-binary women, and gender queer women, and people living with disabilities.

This event is a collaboration between the iEAR Presents series with support from RPI’s ARTS department and School of Humanities, Arts and Social Science, and from the New York State Council for the Arts/ NYSCA, with The Sanctuary for Independent Media, and is a featured project of the NEA Our Town “Sanctuary Eco-Art Trail” creative placemaking grant.

"The Black Woods" Book Talk
2024-04-30 19:00 - 21:00 | The Sanctuary, 3361 6th Ave, Troy, 12180, United States
Join author Amy Godine for a book talk on her most recent work, The Black Woods: Pursuing Racial Justice on the Adirondack Frontier. The presentation will be followed by an audience Q&A.

The Black Woods: Pursuing Racial Justice on the Adirondack Frontier (2023, Cornell University Press) chronicles the dramatic history of Black pioneers in New York’s northern wilderness. From the 1840s into the 1860s, they migrated to the Adirondacks to build farms and to vote. On their new land they could hope to meet the $250 property requirement New York imposed on Black prospective voters in 1821, and gain a cherished right of citizenship, the ballot.

In 1846 and ’47, three thousand Black New Yorkers were gifted with 120,000 acres of Adirondack land by Gerrit Smith, an upstate abolitionist and heir to an immense land fortune. Smith’s suffrage-minded plan was endorsed by Frederick Douglass and New York’s leading Black abolitionists. The antislavery reformer John Brown was such an advocate that in 1849 he moved his family to Timbuctoo, a new Black neighborhood in the woods.

Smith’s plan was prescient, anticipating Black suffrage reform, affirmative action, environmental distributive justice, and community-based racial equity more than a century before these were points of public policy. But when the response to Smith’s offer fell radically short of his high hopes, Smith’s zeal cooled. Timbuctoo, Freemen’s Home, Blacksville, and other Black enclaves were forgotten. Local and regional historians would marginalize the Black experience for 150 years. In The Black Woods, Godine retrieves the robust story of Black pioneers who carved from the wilderness a future for their families and their civic rights. With stirring stories from archival sources, Amy Godine returns these trailblazers and their descendants to their rightful place in the Adirondack narrative. This recovery is long overdue.

Who is Amy Godine?

Amy is a writer, curator, and lecturer with a longstanding interest in the social history of the Adirondack region. She has been writing articles and speaking about social trends, marginalized communities, and ethnic and Black neighborhoods in this high corner of New York since 1988. What do these pieces have in common beyond their focus on this region? One way or another, they aim to challenge or confound entrenched ideas about Adirondack exceptionalism, and reach for the guy lines that lash the region to the wider, fractious world beyond. Miners’ strikes, eastern European peddlers, Klan rallies, Spanish road workers, the pseudo-science of eugenics and its impact on the early conservation movement, suffrage activism, and Black pioneers – her’s is not the Adirondack Country dear to Park historians, nature writers or antiquarians. Amy goes for something else.

Chris Hedges: Normalizing Genocide and the New World Order
2025-03-07 19:00 - 21:00 | The Sanctuary, 3361 6th Ave, Troy, 12180, United States
Chris Hedges will return to the Sanctuary for Independent Media to give the talk “Normalizing Genocide and the New World Order” which asks how the world has changed since the genocide began, how we navigate a world without rules or humanitarian law and how the genocidal violence perpetuated by the Global North, especially as the climate crisis deepens, will be turned with ever more frequency on the peoples of the Global South.

Chris Hedges, the former Middle East Bureau Chief for The New York Times, is a Pulitzer-prize winning reporter and Arabic speaker. He spent 7 years covering the conflict between Israel and Palestine. He is the author of numerous books including the New York Times bestsellers War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America and Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, which he co-authored with the cartoonist Joe Sacco. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University, and the University of Toronto. He has also taught students in the college degree program offered by Rutgers University in the New Jersey prison system for a decade, the subject of his book Our Class: Trauma and Transformation in an American Prison. Chris Hedges’ website: Here

Previous Talk: The Genocide in Gaza, Dec 2023

“Here Comes the Sun” Book Talk with Bill McKibben
2026-04-03 18:45 - 20:00 | The Sanctuary, 3361 6th Ave, Troy, 12180, United States
Acclaimed environmentalist Bill McKibben will be at the Sanctuary to share his hope for our future in Here Comes the Sun, a call to harness the power of the sun and rewrite our scientific, economic, and political future. Join us for this book talk, Q&A, and book signing with McKibben, one of the first to sound the alarm about the climate crisis. McKibben will also be our special guest for a fundraiser dinner! This dinner will be an intimate gourmet vegan meal by extraordinary chef Intaba Liff-Anderson.

Here Comes the Sun is a book about a last chance for the climate and a fresh chance for civilization by Bill McKibben, an author, environmentalist, and activist. In 1988 he wrote The End of Nature, the first book for a common audience about global warming. McKibben comes to the Sanctuary for a talk on his latest book, followed by a Q&A and book signing.

Our climate, and our democracy, are melting down. But Bill McKibben, one of the first to sound the alarm about the climate crisis, insists the moment is also full of possibility. Energy from the sun and wind is suddenly the cheapest power on the planet and growing faster than any energy source in history—if we can keep accelerating the pace, we have a chance.

Here Comes the Sun tells the story of the sudden spike in power from the sun and wind—and the desperate fight of the fossil fuel industry and their politicians to hold this new power at bay. From the everyday citizens who installed solar panels equal to a third of Pakistan’s electric grid in a year to the world’s sixth-largest economy—California—nearly halving its use of natural gas in the last two years, Bill McKibben traces the arrival of plentiful, inexpensive solar energy. And he shows how solar power is more than just a path out of the climate crisis: it is a chance to reorder the world on saner and more humane grounds. You can’t hoard solar energy or hold it in reserves—it’s available to all.

There’s no guarantee we can make this change in time, but there is a hope—in McKibben’s eyes, our best hope for a new civilization: one that looks up to the sun, every day, as the star that fuels our world.

Bill McKibben is founder of Third Act, which organizes people over the age of 60 for action on climate and justice.

His 1989 book The End of Nature is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change, and has appeared in 24 languages. He’s gone on to write 20 books, and his work appears regularly in periodicals from the New Yorker to Rolling Stone. He serves as the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College, as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he has won the Gandhi Peace Prize as well as honorary degrees from 20 colleges and universities. He was awarded the Right Livelihood Award, sometimes called the alternative Nobel, in the Swedish Parliament. Foreign Policy named him to its inaugural list of the world’s 100 most important global thinkers.

McKibben helped found 350.org, the first global grassroots climate campaign, which has organized protests on every continent, including Antarctica, for climate action. He played a leading role in launching the opposition to big oil pipeline projects like Keystone XL, and the fossil fuel divestment campaign, which has become the biggest anti-corporate campaign in history, with endowments worth more than $40 trillion stepping back from oil, gas and coal. He stepped down as board chair of 350 in 2015, and left the board and stepped down from his volunteer role as senior adviser in 2020, accepting emeritus status. He lives in the mountains above Lake Champlain with his wife, the writer Sue Halpern, where he spends as much time as possible outdoors. In 2014, biologists credited his career by naming a new species of woodland gnat—Megophthalmidia mckibbeni–in his honor.

Bill McKibben was interviewed by Mark Dunlea for Hudson Mohawk Magazine.

Special thanks to the Sanctuary community members who made this evening possible.

Blue Mountain Center

Bulich Creekside Farms

Collar City Mushrooms

Golden Leaf Books

Happy Belly Hudson

Honest Weight Food Co-op

Meezan Kitchen

The Placid Baker

Sprouting Heart Farm

Flower Scout

View a full list of our supporters.

"North Stars of Emancipation" Book Talk & Panel Discussion
2026-07-21 19:00 - 21:00
Join us for a book talk about North Stars of Emancipation: California’s Diverse Food and Farming Movements in Times of Racial Reckoning, with author Antonio Roman-Alcalá. A panel with local food justice advocates from Soul Fire Farm, the Radix Center, and Serenity Solidarity will discuss food movements in the Capital Region. Books will be available for sale by Greenlight Books.

North Stars of Emancipation traces the recent evolution of California’s food movements towards a more liberatory model grounded in diverse radical traditions. Drawing on his work in urban farming, radical politics, and academic research, author Antonio Roman-Alcalá will discuss the themes of his book with local food justice advocates.

About this Book

How we grow, harvest, distribute, and consume food is bound up with how we use (and abuse) environmental resources, and how we achieve (or undermine) collective well-being. In North Stars of Emancipation, Antonio Roman-Alcalá finds in the radical experiments of new food movements the seeds of a world liberated from old, extractive systems, where a more equitable way of eating and living is possible.

The book traces the transformation of California’s diverse food movements as Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and other people of color have come to play a larger organizational role, especially at a time of toxic national politics. A new vision now guides these movements, rooted in the radical traditions of anarchism, Black radicalism, and Indigenous resurgence, yet focused on pragmatic solutions to the problems of market and state. In pursuing a North Star political ideal that rejects capitalism, colonialism, and state violence while prioritizing survival, California’s food movements have achieved greater collaboration among sectors, workers, and consumers, pointing toward a promising future.

North Stars of Emancipation takes the rare step of analyzing movements as interconnected wholes. From their collective success, we learn how to move past an untenable present. Published by MIT Press.

Featured Guests

Antonio Roman-Alcalá is an educator, researcher, writer, musician, and organizer based in California who has worked on sustainable food systems and radical politics for over 20 years. Antonio is currently an Assistant Professor at California State University East Bay teaching Geography and Environmental Studies, while researching movements for social and environmental justice through agroecology and food sovereignty. His previous efforts include urban farms, civil society alliances, activist-researcher networks, and documentary film-making.

Hudson Mohawk Magazine · Book Talk "North Stars of Emancipation" Coming to the Sanctuary

Emet Vitale-Penniman is a multiracial farmer, carpenter, and program leader at Soul Fire Farm. He got an early start with growing and building, assisting his parents with CSA packing, youth programs, and house building. Now, he leads educational programming, works with farm team, and leads AV for the campus.

Ericka Williams Rodriguez is an Afro-Indigenous labor and housing organizer, farmer, and advocate for incarcerated people and their families. She co-founded Serenity Solidarity, a Black and Indigenous-led land project in the capital region, and is developing Mumia House there, dedicated to political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. She is a member of New York State Jails Justice Network, and is motivated by ending colonization and the suffering of her people.

Scott Kellogg is the Educational Director at the Radix Center, an urban ecological literacy and just sustainabilities advocacy non-profit in Albany, New York. Radix runs a one-acre farm in the middle of the city that teaches local youth about gardening, composting, tree planting, and river activism. He currently also teaches at Bard College’s Center for Environment and Policy and is Chair of Urban Agriculture for the Albany Sustainability Commission.

Judith Enck on Plastics and Creating Legislation
2026-11-19 19:00 - 21:00 | The Sanctuary, 3361 6th Ave, Troy, 12180, United States
Join us for a book talk and conversation around plastics and how to push legislation with environmental policy expert Judith Enck. After presenting on her book The Problem with Plastic: How We Can Save Ourselves and Our Planet Before It’s Too Late, which investigates plastic innovation which has created devastating environmental and public health impacts, Enck will be joined by Shaunty M of Golden Leaf Books to talk about how to make a bill into law. Enck’s organization Beyond Plastics works on a slew of legislation to reduce the plastic in our environment, while Shaunty has experience pushing electric vehicle legislation.

Register Here… Coming Soon

Golden Leaf Books will supply books for sale.

What if we said that the line between societal advancement and environmental degradation is as thin as a layer of plastic wrap? Once a marvel of modern science, plastic has become so inextricably woven into our lives that imagining a world without can seem impossible. Over the last 75 years, plastic has cradled our planet in a synthetic embrace.

“The Problem with Plastic” critically examines the paradox of this material, first celebrated for its innovations and now recognized for its devastating environmental and public health impacts. This compelling narrative reveals how plastic pollution contributes to poisoned oceans, polluted air, a warming planet, and overwhelming waste, particularly affecting marginalized communities, which bear the brunt of petrochemical pollution. The book highlights the pervasive presence of microplastics in the environment and the human body, challenging the belief that recycling can solve the crisis.

In addition to uncovering environmental racism and debunking industry claims, “The Problem with Plastic” emphasizes the urgent need for action against plastic’s toxic legacy, and offers readers practical, actionable solutions, including a “household waste audit,” which empowers readers to track and reduce their own plastic consumption.
