Faced with the unprecedented threat of climate change, the contemporary world has turned to a solution that is all too prosaic - consumerism. The answer, we are told, is to “go green,” to buy organic food or even a new “clean” car.  Heather Rogers and Kirsty Wright explore the rapid expansion of environmental production and consumption worldwide and the way in which we are coming to rely on consumerism as the solution to the very problems it has helped to cause.  What are the choices and structural forces that led us to this perilous place and do we have the capacity to find solutions that are not mere palliatives, but ways of engaging with how we live and what kind of world we want to live in?

Heather Rogers is a journalist, writer and filmmaker. She has written for The New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones, and The Nation and is author of Green Gone Wrong: How Our Economy is Undermining the Environmental Revolution (published by Verso, 2010). Her first book, Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage (2005), traces the history and politics of household garbage in the United States; the 2002 documentary film of the same title screened at international festivals. Her website is http://www.heatherrogers.info.

Kirsty Wright is the climate justice campaigner at the World Development Movement. She has been involved in the worldwide ‘Climate Justice Now!’ network and recently returned from the People’s Conference on Climate Change in Bolivia, which was organised as a radical response to the failure of the UN talks in Copenhagen.

ICA
Cinema 1
6.30pm
Tickets £12/£11 concessions/£10 members