The “humanities” are anything concerned with human culture, and so the Pittsburgh Humanities Festival ranges wide.
The Pittsburgh Humanities Festival runs Fri., March 22, through Sun., March 24, at venues Downtown.
This year’s line-up for the three-day festival includes writers, artists and scholars from Pittsburgh and around the country exploring subjects from fashion to artificial intelligence, and from stage magic to school lockdowns. Top names include “Crazy Rich Asians” novelist Kevin Kwan and talent from the horror-themed comedy podcast Last Podcast on the Left. It’s the fourth Humanities Festival in the past five years, again sponsored by the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust and the Humanities Center at Carnegie Mellon University.
If one goal of the festival is to introduce people to new subjects, another is to get them to think about familiar topics in new ways.
So it is with “How Not to Save the Planet,” the title of a talk by University of Pittsburgh political-science professor Michael Goodhart. Goodhart is also director of Pitt’s Global Studies Center, where a keystone issue is climate change, which affects things like migration, sustainability, and public health around the world. But Goodhart says the ways many of us think about climate change actually hinder real solutions.
His talk will note five common but counterproductive approaches to climate. One of them is a focus on individual consumer choices, whether that’s recycling, buying organic or biking to work. Those things are “virtuous,” says Goodhart – he practices many of them himself – but they’re the wrong way to regard the problem.
“The contributions that any of us make individually to the overall problem are so small that we’re never going to get to a solution that way,” says Goodhart. “And that’s because the problems are really structural problems, and so we need to address them collectively.”
Collective solutions, he says, include instituting a carbon tax that would signal to every actor in a nation’s economy the need to move away from the carbon-intensive fuels whose use is driving climate change. He emphasizes that while we have the technological know-how to end our dependence on fossil fuels, what’s missing is the leadership and political will. But in the wake of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s terrifying 2018 report, he notes that we don’t have much time.
“Catastrophic climate change is a dire problem and it’s happening now, and part of the goal with this talk is to try to shake people out of their sense of complacency, that somehow everything will turn out OK, or that we still have enough time to figure it out,” says Goodhart, the author of the 2018 book. “Injustice: Political Theory for the Real World.”
While Goodhart will do a solo presentation, most festival speakers will be onstage in conversation with another guest.
Other speakers include former Pittsburgh Post-Gazette political cartoonist Rob Rogers; Pittsburgh-based multidisciplinary artist Bill Shannon; author and journalist Eliza Griswold, addressing “the human cost of fracking”; Reg Douglas of City Theatre, discussing how to get diverse perspectives on stage; nationally touring Pittsburgh-based magician Lee Terbosic; Pittsburgh-based Fashion Africana's Demeatria Boccella; top club deejay DJ Perly; and Pittsburgh-based Instagram influencer Chancelor Humphrey.
A complete line-up and ticket information are here.
Festival events take place Downtown at the Byham Theater, the Trust Arts Education Center and the Harris Theater.
