SFSU lecturer connects climate change with human relationships at GU Climate Institute talk

For San Francisco State University lecturer and community activist Gopal Dayaneni, social movements and community organization — not science — are the most important avenues for responding to the climate crisis.  

Dayaneni spoke at an event hosted by the Gonzaga Institute for Climate, Water, and the Environment on Monday at GU’s John J. Hemmingson Center auditorium, saying that discourse around the climate crisis needs to undergo a drastic shift.  

“If you walk away from this with nothing else, it’s to help us recenter how we understand the climate crisis,” Dayaneni said. “From looking up at the atmosphere and counting carbon to looking down at the economy at the exploitation of land and labor and living systems.” 

Dayaneni said it is important to understand climate change and ecological problems as inextricably connected with human relationships and power structures.  

“What we do to the land we do to the people, and what we do to the people we do to the land,” Dayaneni said.  

Dayaneni also said that the realities of the climate crisis are dictated by the realities of economic systems.  

“All economies are nested in ecosystems. All economies have an ecological basis,” Dayaneni said. “We are all nested within economies. We only ever experience the world through the economy, through the economy in which we are in.”  

When it comes to managing the climate crisis, Dayaneni said science and technology do not offer necessary systemic alterations to the causes of the issues. Without addressing systemic injustices and problematic power structures inherent in climate change, he said that solutions are impossible.  

“I am opposed to all forms of [supremacy], of any kind, because they all lead to the destruction of the Earth,” Dayaneni said. “I do want to reframe our understanding of the climate crisis as somehow this problem of atmosphere, CO2, or somehow this technical problem that we can solve with technical solutions or technologies. It’s not. It’s fundamentally a much more existential question.” 

Dayaneni said that one realistic solution, one found in action all across the world, is a transformed approach to how communities manage common resources.  

“The Commons is not a free for all. It is actually governed by the community through a set of principles in which the community members all know and have access to adjudication and mechanisms for sharing governance,” Dayaneni said. 

Leah Gulick, a climate literacy fellow and vice president of the student group Fossil Free Gonzaga, said Dayaneni’s talk effected her understanding of climate justice and activism.  

“[Hearing] how important local action is, and then how much relationship building and Indigenous-led efforts [are], it just brought me a lot of hope because it is so tangible.” 

Gulick said that Dayaneni attended one of her club’s meetings, where he talked with the group about methods of activism against institutional issues.  

“We got to talk with Gopal for Fossil Free Gonzaga and our organizing work there,” Gulick said. “He gave us some fantastic information about student organizing and how to hold Gonzaga as an institution accountable, and that [created] a lot of resolve and a lot of just excitement.”