Educating for Sustainability is the Office of Sustainability’s semi-annual lecture series that invites environmental scholars and leaders to address the NYU community.

About the event:

Join us for a presentation from scholar, scientist, and organizer Cynthia Malone who will discuss how scientific racism shapes the Anthropocene, our current geological epoch marked by sustained, human-derived environmental degradation and climate change on a planetary scale. In this talk, she will unpack the historical use of science to legitimize white supremacy and how this ideology continues to inform discourse and practice in environmental fields such as conservation science. Malone will explore how Black peoples across the diaspora contest scientific racism and its impacts on the environment through land-based struggle, music, and scholarship in the Black Radical Tradition. Cynthia Malone presents visions for a sustainable future that center decolonial science, environmental stewardship, and liberation from oppressive ideologies and systems.

About the speaker:

Cynthia Malone (she/her/hers) is a scholar, scientist, and organizer from NYC. Following a decade of research on the conservation of wildlife and ecosystems globally, Cynthia is dedicated to abolitionist approaches to environmental stewardship and Black liberation. Her current research unpacks scientific racism in the applied natural sciences and how Black peoples across the diaspora contest this racism in land-based struggle, scholarship, and music. Cynthia has been invested in political education and direct action organizing in the movement for Black lives since 2015. She is a member and former organizing co-chair of BYP100’s NYC Chapter. In 2017 she was named one of Grist magazine’s 50 “Fixers” in recognition of her leadership in advocacy for equity in conservation and STEM. Cynthia holds a Masters in Conservation Biology from Columbia University, where she worked with farmers in southwest Cameroon to understand conflicts with wildlife amidst the expansion of industrial oil palm plantations. She earned a Bachelors of Science in Zoology and in Anthropology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she completed an honors thesis on the nesting ecology of Bornean orangutans in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia.

The 2019 Spring Educating for Sustainability is sponsored by the Office of Global Inclusion, Diversity, and Strategic Innovation, Environmental Humanities Initiative, and the Department of Environmental Studies.