Norway, Maine
Mark your calendars for our annual in-person climate convergence!
May 17-18, 2024
We are pleased to announce that our fifth annual climate convergence will be keynoted by Living on Earth's Steve Curwood and polar scientist Dr. Susana Hancock. Mark your calendar to join us Friday, May 17th and Saturday, May 18th in Norway for two days of inspiration, knowledge sharing, and power building. Dr. Susana Hancock will join us on Friday, and Steve Curwood will join us on Saturday.
Registration is preferred by May 1. No one will be turned away, but pre-registration is preferred to support us in accurate planning.
Volunteer to help make the convergence a success! Volunteers get free admission, including meals, and an event T-shirt. Sign up here.
Dr. Susana Hancock is someone who goes to the ends of the Earth to save the climate. Literally. Every year, the Maine-native clicks into her skis and conducts research on some of the world's most vulnerable ecosystems: the polar ice caps. The poles currently harbor nine of the top 16 climate tipping points, and Susana is particularly interested in understanding and communicating the cascading planet-wide impacts of some of the most pressing ones. When not on the ice, she works with global leaders, heads of state and decision makers to understand the implications of polar-driven climate risk on communities around the world. Most recently, she was part of a 2022 attempt to recreate a failed North Pole expedition from 150 years earlier and is now in the final stages of preparations to ski 1,000 km across Greenland. There, she will study how methane and other planet-warming gases are coming through the polar ice at still unestablished quantities, and will also work with schools around the world to conduct student experiments from elementary-high school classrooms and share lessons from the ice.
Steve Curwood is Executive Producer and Host of Living on Earth. Steve created the first pilot of Living on Earth in the spring of 1990, and the show has run continuously since April 1991. Today, Living on Earth with Steve Curwood is aired on more than 300 National Public Radio affiliates in the US. Steve's relationship with NPR goes back to 1979 when he began as a reporter and host of Weekend All Things Considered. Steve has been a journalist for more than 30 years. He shared the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service as part of the Boston Globe's education team. Steve Curwood is also the recipient of the 2003 Global Green Award for Media Design, the 2003 David A. Brower Award from the Sierra Club for excellence in environmental reporting and the 1992 New England Environmental Leadership Award from Tufts University for his work on promoting environmental awareness. He is president of the World Media Foundation, Inc. and a Lecturer in Environmental Science and Public Policy at Harvard University. He lives in southern New Hampshire on a small woodlot with his family.
View the schedule for the convergence below, and check back for frequent updates.
Looking Back: Our 2023 Climate Convergence
Thank you to all who joined us in May 2023 for our fourth annual climate convergence! We appreciate everyone who volunteered, sang, shared, cried, connected, listened, presented, tabled, sponsored, and pitched in!
Friday’s lineup included workshops and facilitated discussions ranging from addressing climate grief to building an ecology-based economy, and a keynote by Jonathan Fulford, sharing a lifetime’s experience of activism, followed by earth oven pizza at Alan Day Community Garden and live music at Cottage Street. On Saturday, we heard from Dr. Jacquelyn Gill of the UMaine Climate Change Institute. We also had our Youth Voices panel and a panel on rural grassroots successes with Johannah Blackman, Executive Director of A Climate To Thrive, and our own Claire McGlinchey.
Hallmarks of each convergence include workshops, roundtable discussions and presentations, as well as great food, music, art and poetry to energize the urgent work of climate justice. It is designed to be inclusive, interactive, and to celebrate and engage the collective wisdom of all who attend. In this critical moment, as climate change accelerates and biodiversity is increasingly threatened, we also see unprecedented support for building community resilience and fighting for a liveable planet.
If you've never been to one of our convergences before, check out the recordings from previous years. We started with 2020 Vision: Finding Hope in Climate Action, keynoted by Bill McKibben in March 2020. We then moved to 2030 Vision: From Climate Action to Climate Justice, thinking about our climate decade and the work that needs to be done to reach our 2030 emission reduction targets. In 2021, we held a week of virtual events. In 2022, for 2030 Vision: Collective Power for Climate Justice, we gathered outdoors in Norway for a joyous, sunny, and sometimes chilly Earth Day weekend.
Thank You to our Sponsors!
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