At a time of increasing (and increasingly open) anxiety about the environment, this daylong symposium looks critically at environmental activism—its recent history and current states, where it is defeated and where it is optimistic and energetic—and considers possible directions for the future.

This special collaboration with the University of T oronto builds on the CCA exhibition It’s All Happening So Fast: A Counter-History of the Modern Canadian Environment, which is on view at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto until 15 July. The exhibition and accompanying publication reconsider the history of Canada’s relationship with the land since 1945, using environmental disasters to expose complex connections among different interests, competing cultural myths, evolving legal contexts, changing ideas of environmental risk, resurgent Indigenous Peoples, and the impacts of the environmental movement. The project illustrates the need to radically reassess our assumptions and to take a position in the face of crisis.

Through addressing the current state of affairs of environmental activism in Canada, the symposium will interrogate mainstream and experimental approaches to environmental law, and recover alternative frameworks for individual and collective action, including non-western traditions and emergent technologies.

Speakers include scholars, activists, and artists: Cuyler Cotton, Ellen Gabriel, Corrigan Hammond, Bruce Livesy, Martin Lukacs, Michelle Murphy, Wanda Nanibush, Ryan O’Connor, David Paterson, Darryl Redsky, Ingrid Thompson, and Graeme Wynn, with Barbara Fischer, Lev Bratishenko and Mirko Zardini.