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Tim Weiskel
Harvard University Extension School
&
Research Director
Cambridge Climate Research Associates (CCRA)

TIMOTHY C. WEISKEL, graduated magnum cum laude from Yale University. He trained as a social anthropologist and an historian as a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford and the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. Following field work in West Africa he received his D.Phil. from Oxford University and returned to the United States to teach anthropology and history at Williams College, Yale University and Harvard.

His research concentrates upon belief systems within cultures and how core cultural beliefs can either facilitate change or block change over time.

In particular, he has examined how dominant belief systems serve to impede or enable different cultures to perceive the changing environmental challenges that confront us all as a human family. To pursue this work he co-founded The Climate Talks Project in 2001 along with Professor William Moomaw of the Fletcher School at Tufts University. This group has convened scholars, business leaders, NGO activists, journalists and concerned citizens to discuss effective means of mobilizing civil society to respond to the evolving global climate crisis.

Mr. Weiskel currently teaches online courses on global climate change, environmental ethics and environmental justice in the Sustainability and Environmental Management (SEM) program through Harvard's Extension School. These courses focus upon the ideological and conceptual barriers to transforming our current industrial culture based upon metaphors of continuous consumption and perpetual growth into new cultural forms based instead upon metaphors of stability, justice and global sustainability.

Inspired by the life-long example of Bill Coffin and the impressive achievements of fellow classmate, Dan Yergin (Yale, '68), who's Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA) has enabled his clients and the wider world to understand energy issues over the last quarter century, Weiskel helped to found the Cambridge Climate Research Associates (CCRA). This group consults with organizations to ceate on site and online training programs for institutions, universities, corporations, municipalities, and national governments. The goal is to assist these organizations in analyzing the climate impact of global carbon consumption and help them envision the necessary transformations we must all now undertake to enable the human community to move to a post carbon-fueled world.