Commonwealth Club Of California Podcast

Please join The Commonwealth Club of California and UC Berkeley’s Townsend Center for the Humanities for the second in a series of dialogues on catastrophe, storytelling and the present moment. In “Climate Change and Sacred Groves,” Townsend Center scholar Sugata Ray will meet with visual artist Ranu Mukherjee to investigate the relationship between the natural world and the sacred realm, especially as it has developed in India over the last several centuries of civilization and the rise of the Anthropocene era. In his most recent book, Climate Change and the Art of Devotion, Sugata shows how a site-specific and ecologically grounded theology emerged in northern India in the wake of the Little Ice Age (ca. 1550–1850), an epoch marked by climatic catastrophes across the globe. His interests dovetail in unexpected and compelling ways with Ranu’s visionary and captivating recent work, which positions the banyan tree as a meeting point between ecology and culture. Their conversation will be an opportunity for vie