Post 12/6: AD White weighs in on the expressive policy
Andrew Dickson White has weighed in on the Cornell Committee on Expressive Activity Draft Report Policy. Although hardly known as a man of principle (he was zealously involved in Indigenous dispossession), even he is perturbed by the administration’s silence and silencing in the face of an existential crisis. It is remarkable for one so long dead to send a message, but send a message he does: “The science is clear. Don’t look away. Don’t muzzle protesters. Declare a Climate Emergency.”
Newsletter #11: Thanksgiving and Mourning
This is a week of grieving and thanksgiving. Last Thanksgiving season, we asked Robin Wall Kimmerer: what teachings are needed now for universities like Cornell? She pointed us to the principles of the Honorable Harvest. This Thanksgiving, we invite you to envision what an Honorable Harvest might look like in higher education. It’s an open call: will you help us experimentally apply these Indigenous principles to our shared predicament?
Cornell on Fire Post 11/6: On Love and Rage
Yesterday, half the people of the US voted for Trump. For many of us, the election results feel like hearing that someone (or everyone) we love is dying. But the day before the election, insights from a campus panel on “Indigenous Perspectives in Education” shed light on how to contain our rage and engage with multiple ways of knowing.
Cornell on Fire Post 10/24: The times they are a-changin’
Word is spreading. This week, an action by Cornell on Fire and co-organizers Fossil Free Cornell, Sunrise Movement Ithaca, TIAA-Divest!, and the Cornell chapter of the Association of American University Professors (AAUP) made front page news in the Ithaca Voice. Their message to Cornell’s Council and Trustees: for earth’s sake, stand up or step aside.
Cornell on Fire Post 10/11: The sound of a policy backfiring
“Actions have consequences.” And the consequences of the Cornell administration’s repressive expressive policy actions have been swift and unequivocal: they have masterfully backfired. Their willingness to walk so far out on the quaking branch of overreaching authority reflects the degree to which they fear activism that dares to go beyond sidewalk-chalk to engage in actual protest and civil disobedience.
Cornell on Fire Post 9/26: Three transmissions
We write to transmit three tidings of mixed import (bad news/good news), and invite you to build upon the "good news" side of the equations with us. Read on for compelling new evidence to support the adage: Never doubt that a small group of the committed can change the world.
Cornell on Fire Post 9/11: A Love Poem
We present a love poem dedicated to Cornell's own anti-science consultants and their Cornell paycheck-writers. Titled "In this House We Believe Science is Real," this poem commemorates the twisted romance between a world-class research institution and a bottom-class lobbyist firm engaged in an astoturf campaign to greenwash the health and environmental impacts of plastic grass.
Cornell on Fire: A call from our alliance partners
While CoF is regenerating, our Alliance Partners are calling for concerned citizens and Cornellians to add their names to a public sign-on letter calling for sound science and democratic participation around Cornell's proposed artificial turf fields.
Cornell on Fire Weekly 7/5: On regeneration
Cornell on Fire will take a regenerative break in July to slow up and dig deeper, while some of us remain active in working groups. As we take a regenerative pause, we are grateful that earth has never taken a moment’s pause from supporting our lives. This month, we invite each one of you to actively contemplate what it will take to create the world we wish to live in.
Cornell on Fire Weekly 6/20: We’ve always done it this way
We are alive at a time when the way things have “always” been is no longer a good guide to the future. But this simple point is hypnotically hard to communicate. On this Summer Solstice, consider four true stories…and imagine changing our lives for the vastly more beautiful. To the miracle of the commons!
Cornell on Fire Weekly 6/12: On disruptive action
Our banner action last Friday calls for two confessions and a question: what constitutes disruptive action?
Cornell on Fire Weekly 6/5: Earthside
The evidence is overwhelming and irrefutable: we are in the middle of a climate catastrophe. The Climate Defiance movement has been calling on people to “drop everything” and act. Why don’t we? Together, we have immense power to help Cornell lead by example in the transition we all desperately need.
Poem: Extrapolation of the Facts
A poem by Cornell undergraduate Lee Linus Jing Wo, on the pretty lies of fossil fuels that lead us to our grave.
Cornell on Fire Weekly 5/29
In honor of Cornell’s 156th Commencement, we held a banner drop announcing a critical moment for climate accountability: will Big Red continue to echo Big Oil’s climate denial, disinformation, and doublespeak? This moment of reckoning for Cornell involves climate hypocrisy on multiple fronts. The hottest front now is artificial turf.
Cornell on Fire Weekly 5/23
Cornell the Corporation has outdone itself in embarrassing Cornell the University. In support of their newest construction project, lovingly named for an Oil Baron, Cornell has submitted a strikingly inept "summary of research" on artificial turf fields to Ithaca’s Town and City Planning Boards. Except the report is not authored by scientists, and it does not review the scientific literature.
Cornell on Fire Weekly 5/15
In the entire history of the world, the Redbud trees were never so beautiful as they were this year. They arrayed themselves in splendor, even around the parking lot that Cornell bulldozed through our community nineteen years ago, in what was once called Redbud Woods. We hope the current cohort of Cornell administrators parked there last week, and saw the Redbuds, and that their hearts were broken open.
Cornell on Fire Weekly 5/8
I remember how it felt to be an undergraduate student on the verge of release from the pressure and routines of the academic year at an elite university: ready to make memories with friends through a giant rite of passage. But imagine if Cornell had an end-of-year celebration connected to the Earth. What would it look like?
Cornell on Fire Weekly 5/1
On April 22nd, we moved to Reclaim Earth Day from media greenwashing, corporate propaganda, and obfuscation by the political shills of the reigning socioeconomic world order. On this May Day, we must move onward to secure the earth itself and all its inhabitants, human and others, from those who are burning and inundating and poisoning and stripping it of life for the sake of personal profit, and from the political-economic system that enables and protects them.
Cornell on Fire Weekly 4/24
When over 440 people take action across Tompkins County to reclaim their relationship with earth and one another, something moves. On Monday, April 22, the people of Ithaca joined forces across campuses and the community to act in concert with the national movement to Reclaim Earth Day. We streamed in from the east, south, north, and west, in six different marches converging on the center. Under clear blue skies, we reclaimed our duty and our right to climate honesty.
Michael Charles speaks to Reclaim Earth Day
With gratitude, we reprint the opening address for Reclaim Earth Day by Cornell Professor Michael Charles, a Diné (Navajo) scholar and Provost’s New Faculty Fellow and Assistant Professor in Biological and Environmental Engineering.
May we walk in beauty.