Following the screening of the 89-minute documentary Climate Refugees, there will be a panel discussion including filmmaker Michael Nash and several Bates faculty members. For more information, please call 207-786-6289.

A climate refugee is someone displaced by climatically induced environmental disasters — disasters that result from both gradual and rapid ecological changes. These include increased droughts, desertification, sea level rise and the increasing frequency of extreme weather events such as hurricanes, cyclones, fires, mass flooding and tornadoes.

The International Organization for Migration has estimated that climate change would drive a billion people worldwide from their homes in the next four decades, according to Reuters. In 2008, 20 million people became homeless in environmental disasters. The Pentagon now considers climate change a national security risk, and the term “climate wars” has become common currency in Washington, D.C.

Nash traversed the globe for two years capturing the suffering of cultures whose very survival is challenged by effects of global warming. The film depicts the dire circumstances of these climate refugees.

Among the cases examined in the film are the South Pacific’s Tuvalu Islands, threatened with obliteration by rising water levels; drought-affected regions of Sudan; storm-susceptible coastlines of Bangladesh; and rapidly expanding deserts in China that are forcing mass relocations.

Nash was inspired to make the film after reading a study by the United Nations University stating that there are currently more environmental refugees in the world than refugees from political or religious persecution. “I just thought that was crazy,” says Nash.

The film includes testimonials from politicians, scientists, relief organizations and authors who call for new policies and new cooperation to find solutions for this crisis. The United Nations held a private screening of the film for world leaders and scientists at the 2009 Climate Conference in Copenhagen.

Sherri Quinn of National Public Radio called the film “a resounding wake-up call for every human being to go green immediately. It is a must-see film that puts the human soul in the science of climate change.”

On March 12 and 13, two decisive actors in the effort to curtail global climate change offer back-to-back talks at Bates College.

Bill McKibben, the environmental journalist who wrote the first book aimed at a general readership about climate change, gives a talk titled “Global Warming: Fighting Against It, Living With It” at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, March 12, in Chase Hall, 56 Campus Ave.

Sören Hermansen, named one of Time Magazine’s 2008 Heroes of the Environment for his leadership in a Danish island’s conversion to fully sustainable, carbon-neutral energy, speaks at 2:45 p.m. Friday, March 13, in Keck Classroom (G52), Pettengill Hall, Alumni Walk.

Both events are open to the public at no charge. Sponsored by the Harward Center for Community Partnerships at Bates, the McKibben event is part of the series “The Civic Forum: Maine in a Transnational Age.” For more information, please call 207-786-6202.

The Hermansen event is sponsored by the Program in Environmental Studies at Bates. For more information, please call 207-786-6490.

McKibben is an American environmentalist and journalist who writes about global warming, alternative energy and the risks associated with human genetic engineering. His first book, The End of Nature (Random House, 1989), is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change, and has been printed in more than 20 languages. Several editions have come out in the United States, including an updated version published in 2006.

In late summer 2006, McKibben helped lead a walk across Vermont to demand action on global warming, a demonstration that some newspaper accounts called the largest to date in America about climate change. He founded Step It Up 2007, an organization advocating that Congress enact curbs on carbon emissions that would cut global warming pollution 80 percent by 2050. With 1,400 global warming protests in all 50 states in April 2007, Step It Up 2007 has been described as the largest day of protest about climate change in U.S. history.

McKibben’s second book, The Age of Missing Information (Random House, 1992), is an account of an experiment: He collected everything transmitted on the 100 channels of cable TV on the Fairfax, Va., system (at the time among the nation’s largest) for a single day. He spent a year watching the 2,400 hours of videotape, and then compared it to a day spent on the mountaintop near his home. This book has been widely used in colleges and high schools, and was released in a new edition in 2006.

Subsequent McKibben books have explored the Book of Job and the environment; human population; and what he sees as the existential dangers of genetic engineering. Deep Economy: the Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future (Times Books, 2007) addresses shortcomings of the growth economy and envisions a transition to more local-scale enterprise.

A scholar in residence at Middlebury College, McKibben lives with his wife and daughter in Ripton, Vt.

Since 1997, Sören Hermansen has led the 4,300 inhabitants of the Danish island of Samsø, where he was born, away from dependence on imported fossil fuels and toward sustainable, carbon-neutral energy use. Once reliant on oil for heat and coal for its electricity, island residents today heat their buildings with solar and geothermal technology and island-grown straw, and produce enough electricity from the wind that Samsø is a net exporter of electricity.

In 1997, Denmark’s government announced a renewable-energy contest challenging communities to show that they could live without fossil fuels. As leader of the Samsø Energy and Environment Organization, Hermansen persuaded his fellow islanders — through gentle coaxing, persistence and occasionally, free beer — to make the difficult changes in mindset, technology and lifestyle that would free the island from its fossil-fuel addiction.

Hermansen had a hand in the adoption of myriad sustainable technologies around the island, from wind turbine construction, to solar heat and electricity, to the use of biomass grown on the island, such as straw and wood chips, for residential heating.

The islanders “formed energy cooperatives and organized seminars on wind power,” writer Elizabeth Kolbert reported in “Island in the Wind,” an article about Samsø in the July 7, 2008, issue of The New Yorker. They supported the construction of wind turbines on the island and offshore.

“They removed their furnaces and replaced them with heat pumps. By 2001, fossil-fuel use on Samsø had been cut in half. By 2003, instead of importing electricity, the island was exporting it, and by 2005 it was producing from renewable sources more energy than it was using.”

While some island residents continue to run their vehicles on fossil fuels, the island’s wind-generated electricity offsets the carbon produced by vehicles. Samsø shows that renewable energy can directly benefit its users through more than just moral satisfaction, too, as shareholders in some of the wind turbines receive dividends from the sale of power.

“We always hear that we should think globally and act locally,” Hermansen told Kolbert. “I understand what that means — I think we as a nation should be part of the global consciousness. But each individual cannot be part of that. So ‘Think locally, act locally’ is the key message for us.”

Today, as director of the Samsø Energy Academy, Hermensen has told the story of Samsø at conferences around Europe and in Asia, as well as the United States.

Bates is one of eight colleges and universities in Maine, and more than 100 nationwide, to sign an agreement to become “carbon neutral” — that is, to reduce institutional emissions of carbon-based greenhouse gases such that they no longer increase the atmospheric total of such gases.

In February, Bates President Elaine Tuttle Hansen signed the American College & University Presidents Climate Commitment. She is one of 62 chief executives in the coalition’s Leadership Circle, which provides guidance, peer encouragement and direction to the effort.

Hansen’s commitment on behalf of the college came just weeks after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, established by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme, issued a report that leaves little doubt about the link among human activity, greenhouse gas emissions and the warming of the Earth’s climate, a phenomenon with potentially devastating consequences.

“Many Bates students, faculty and staff members are vitally concerned about all aspects of environmental stewardship,” Hansen says. “We’ve worked hard for many years on researching and teaching about the environment, and Bates also has a proud history of success in programs ranging from Dining Services’ food-waste management to our recent decision to purchase green energy.”

She says, “The time was right for Bates to step forward.”

Patterned after the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, the ACUPCC commits Bates and its fellow signatories to an ultimate goal of eliminating greenhouse gas emissions through a five-step process:

1) Completing an institutional inventory of emissions (which in Bates’ case should be done this spring); 2) setting a target date and milestones for achieving climate neutrality; 3) taking immediate short-term steps to reduce emissions; 4) integrating sustainability into the curriculum and the educational experience; and 5) making the action plan, emissions inventory and progress reports publicly available. (The agreement also calls for participants to step up research relevant to climate change.)

“Colleges and universities play a very important role in sustainability,” Hansen says. “We are, after all, educating future leaders, so we have both a special responsibility and a special opportunity to instill students with a sense of the urgency and complexities of finding solutions to the problems of living on Earth.”

She adds, “As institutions, we should also be able to demonstrate operationally how to make innovative, sustainable choices. And we should encourage other institutions to follow our lead in working to protect the environment.”

Winning individual hearts and minds to the cause will be key to the Bates effort, says environmental coordinator Julie Rosenbach. “We can work on policies, incentive programs and infrastructures to help people with their decisions,” she says.

“If you tell people, ‘We have to stop climate change,’ it’s totally overwhelming,” she added. “But if you give them concrete steps to take, most people are interested.”

Three national nonprofit organizations that advocate environmental sustainability initiated the ACUPCC: EcoAmerica, Second Nature and the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education. The latter two are involved specifically with higher education.

Presidents Bernie Machen of the University of Florida, Michael Crow of Arizona State University and Jo Ann M. Gora of Ball State University were among the first to sign the commitment, late last year. As of March 5, 108 colleges and universities were on board.