Date/Time
Date(s) - Thu 28 November
18:00 - 19:00
Location
Lecture Theatre One (GBLT1), Old Government Buildings, VUW
Professor Nick Golledge of the Antarctic Research Centre will present the New Zealand Antarctic Society’s 2024 SIR HOLMES MILLER MEMORIAL LECTURE.
Sync or swim: saving an atomized society from the polycrisis
We currently face global-scale crises related to climate change and a loss of biodiversity. Simultaneously, modern societies continue to wrestle with inequalities related to gender, race, wealth, and other factors. Having previously encouraged individualism and exceptionalism we now find ourselves with sectors of the global population developing increasingly polarized views that reject scientific authority and evidence-based decision-making. To tackle this polycrisis we need social cohesion, not atomization. In this talk, Nick will take us back to times when social cohesion was a prerequisite for survival, and collective action was the mechanism through which a population found freedom and autonomy. Exploring social behaviours through the lens of system dynamics, and the physical laws that allow those systems to self-organise, Nick will illustrate some of the fundamental processes that underpin many aspects of our world. The uniformity of these behaviours, across a vast range of scales, reflects a deeper connectivity that similarly transcends scales and reveals a beautiful simplicity and predictability to our situation. By understanding the feedbacks that shape these systems we also find the agency needed to effect purposeful change.
Nick Golledge is Professor of Glaciology at Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington, a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand, and a Lead Author of the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. From his early career as a geologist in Scotland to his more recent focus on Antarctica and its response to environmental change, Nick has always tried to adopt a multi-disciplinary approach to his research. In 2023 he published a popular science book, “FEEDBACK: Uncovering the hidden connections between life and the universe” (Prometheus Books) that spanned the physical, biological, and social sciences. This systems-level view has earned Nick the Hutton Medal (Royal Society of New Zealand, 2023), the Hill Tinsley Medal (New Zealand Association of Scientists, 2019) and the McKay Hammer Award (Geoscience Society of New Zealand, 2017).
All welcome, no registration required.