George Monbiot, Sébastien Treyer, and Emma Heiling on Feeding the World @AmericanLibraryParis

Uploaded May 2023 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago

Meeting four of Ecologues, a series of interactive webinars featuring experts on various aspects of the environmental crisis. Organized by the American Library in Paris, News Decoder, and the Climate Academy at the European School of Brussels. Filmed on 24/07/2023 with a live audience both in person and on Zoom.

While half of the world’s habitable land is used to produce our food, fertilizers, sewage, and pesticides contaminate large swathes of the rest. How to feed the world, we might ask, without destroying the planet? Three climate experts and activists convene to discuss the future of food on a planet in peril.

About the speakers:

George Monbiot, author of Regenesis:Feeding the World without Devouring the Planet, is a columnist, filmmaker, and essayist.

Sébastien Treyer is Executive Director of IDDRI, a think tank which facilitates the transition towards sustainable development.

Emma Heiling is the Founder & CEO of ClimaTalk, a youth-led non-profit organisation demystifying climate policy and empowering young people in the fight for climate action.

The Library’s contribution to this joint program is supported by the Florence Gould Foundation and the American Center for Arts and Culture.

George Monbiot, Sébastien Treyer, and Emma Heiling on Feeding the World

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$Toni Ann Johnson and Robinne Lee on Light Skin Gone to Waste A conversation between Toni Ann Johnson and Robinne Lee at the American Library in Paris. Filmed on 01/02/2023 with a live audience both in person and on Zoom. Novelist Toni Ann Johnson speaks with actor and writer Robinne Lee about fractured families and the wounds of racism in the context of new work, Light Skin Gone to Waste. When a middle class Black family moves to an all-white suburb, fantasies of class ascension and racial transcendence clash with cruel realities. Thus begins screenwriter and author Toni Ann Johnson’s new release Light Skin Gone to Waste, an honest and devastating account of an already-fractured family’s collapse under the prism of a racialized world. With theatrical agility, Johnson stages a collision of individual psychologies with malignant social structures which has tragic proportions. A story of intergenerational trauma, cycles of abuse, childhood, marriage, lofty aspirations and high prices paid, the work lays bare the multiple networks of pain which have racism at their core. Johnson appeared with author and actor Robinne Lee. About the speakers: Toni Ann Johnson won the Flannery O’Connor Award for her linked story collection Light Skin Gone to Waste (UGA Press, 2022), which was selected for the prize and edited by Roxane Gay. This work of autobiographical fiction follows the Arringtons, an upper-middle- class Black family that moves to a White, working-class town in Upstate New York in the 1960s. Homegoing, a novella, was released by Accents Publishing after winning the press’s inaugural novella contest and revisits the Arrington family and the town’s effect on them years later in 2006. A novel, Remedy For a Broken Angel, was published in 2014 and earned a 2015 NAACP Image Award nomination for Outstanding Literary Work by a Debut Author. Robinne Lee is a Jamaican-American writer, actor, and producer. A graduate of Yale University and Columbia Law School, Robinne has accrued numerous acting credits in both film and television over the past two decades, most notably in “Hitch,” “Seven Pounds,” “Hotel for Dogs,” “13 Going on 30,” “Being Mary Jane,” and the “Fifty Shades” franchise. Her debut novel, The Idea of You, originally published by St. Martin’s Press in 2017, is now an international bestseller, with over a dozen foreign translations and is in production at Amazon Prime Studios with Anne Hathaway in the lead role. Robinne is attached as a producer. She can currently be seen in Netflix’s limited series “Kaleidoscope,” opposite Giancarlo Esposito. Evenings with an Author is generously sponsored by GRoW @ Annenberg.$

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