Gender and environment event to be held

The Institute for Women’s Leadership (IWL) is set to hold an open, discussion-based event around gender and the environment on Thursday, April 23 from 7-8 p.m. in Upper Gorecki.

The event will feature a panel consisting of a CSB professor and two Bennie alumnae and aims to create space for meaningful conversations around this intersection.

CSB junior Natalie Biren, IWL’s PR and Marketing Coordinator, has been organizing the event alongside her coworker CSB senior Madisen Carter.

For the past two years, the IWL has hosted events in honor of Earth Day, including last year’s focus on the environmental impact of the fashion industry.

This year, the event shifts toward a broader and more complex conversation, connecting pressing environmental issues and policy with IWL’s central focus: gender.

Biren said the environmental justice conversations often lack a strong understanding of how gender shapes both impact and response.

“It’s not just the nature that you think about, but also the people that are involved with [or in it] that may cause many of the different climate justice issues,” Biren said.

At its core, the event will explore how gender’s role influences who is most affected by environmental challenges, who holds power and whose voices are heard in shaping solutions.

Corrie Grosse, the first panelist, is a sociologist and associate professor of environmental studies at CSB+SJU.

According to her event bio, her interest in gender and the environment began during her undergraduate years through activism supporting women small-scale farmers.

The second panelist, Danee Voss CSB ‘21 is described in her event bio as an experiential educator and backcountry guide committed to building a climate-just future for all through place-based, community-led solutions.

The third panelist, also a 2021 Bennie alumna, is Charly Frisk.

She currently serves as the Development Associate and Climate Producer at The Great Northern, a Twin Cities winter festival focused on the intersection of climate, culture and art, and holds a master’s degree from Yale School of the Environment.

It is IWL’s hope that through the panelists’ perspectives and interaction with the audience, attendees will learn how environmental issues do not affect people equally, often due to systems of inequality.

Research highlighted by earth.org shows that women, especially in lower-income or rural communities, are often more vulnerable to the dangerous effects of climate change.

This is partly because they are more likely to be the ones responsible for providing for the family during environmental crises such as droughts or floods.

Beyond examining those affected by environmental issues, Biren hopes the event will also address representation in environmental decision-making.

“To talk about whose voices are missing from the conversations and why,” Biren said. “Future environmental change is in the hands of the policymakers, but I hope that students might feel called from these conversations to engage in creating change.”

Biren also emphasized that this is not a “women vs. men” conversation, but rather one about broadening inclusion.

“Other people can learn from [this]. Maybe they don’t necessarily fall into the binary genders, so having that opportunity to see that ‘okay, maybe I can be more involved in the environmental movement’ [is important],” Biren said.

She hopes that the event will create space to consider how gender nonconforming and LGBTQ+ individuals may also face heightened vulnerability in environmental contexts.

For those interested in seeing how they can get involved in environmental and feminist causes, Biren welcomes them to attend.

“We can’t reverse climate change, but how can we benefit the earth and everything around it?” Biren said — a key question the event invites attendees to consider.