(BRUNSWICK, Maine) — Joel Clement, senior fellow at the Harvard Belfer Center’s Arctic Initiative, will speak at Bowdoin College on Wednesday at 7 p.m. in Kresge Auditorium, Visual Arts Center. In his talk, “From Crisis to Resilience in the Arctic: At the Front Lines of Change and Innovation,” Clement will discuss climate change and its impact on Arctic people.
Until 2017, Clement was a member of the Office of Policy Analysis in the Department of the Interior, where he worked closely with Alaskan indigenous communities facing imminent danger.
Due to a warming Arctic, coastal villages are eroding into the sea as the frozen ground on which they were built melts, sea levels rise, and unusually strong storms batter the region. He will draw on this experience, discussing the importance of traditional indigenous knowledge and its lessons about flexibility and resilience.
Clement became a whistleblower when, under the Trump administration, he and many of his Department of the Interior colleagues specializing in climate change issues were reassigned to positions for which they were ill-suited, according to a news release from the college. Subsequently, he resigned and joined the Belfer Center’s Arctic Initiative.
Clement is also a senior fellow with the Union of Concerned Scientists where he is involved in the Science Protection Project, devoted to supporting Federal employees involved in public health, public safety, and environmental policymaking issues.
Mr. Clement’s presentation is part of the Environmental and Social Justice Lecture Series hosted by the Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum and Arctic Studies Center, Bowdoin College.
The series was made possible by a gift from Rebecca J. Rowe. The lecture is free and open to the public. For more information go to www.bowdoin.edu/arctic-museum or call (207) 725-3416.
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