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Thank you, Shami. It is an honor to be introduced by you. Thank you for all of your courageous and wonderful work.

I also want to thank Jude Kelly. It's so good to be back at the South Bank Center.

And Jacqueline Rose for extending the original invitation. And I wish to acknowledge that with us here tonight

is Miriam Saeed, who shared her life with Edward, was his great collaborator and carries

his work forward in so many ways. The focus of my talk tonight is the climate crisis and the central

role that systems that rank the relative value of human beings, including but not limited to

white supremacy, patriarchy, and orientalentalism have played in deepening that crisis.

Before I get into all of that, I should acknowledge that it may seem slightly strange for

an Edward Said Memorial Lecture to focus on an environmental topic.

Said, as some of you are aware, was not known as a tree hugger.

Descended from traders, artisans, and professionals.

He once described himself as an extreme case of an urban Palestinian

whose relationship to the land is basically metaphorical.

In after the last sky, Said's powerful meditation on the photographs of Jean Moore,

he explored the most intimate aspects of Palestinian lives, from hospitality to sports to home decor, the tiniest detail,

the placement of a photograph, the defiant posture of a child, provoked a torrent of insight

from Saeed. But when confronted with images of Palestinian farmers, tending to their flocks, working the fields.

This specificity evaporated. Which crops were being cultivated, the state of the soil, the state of the water supply,

mysteriously gone. Sayy confessed, I continue to perceive a population of poor suffering

occasionally colorful peasants, unchanged and collective, though he acknowledged that this

perception was basically mythic. If farming was another world for Edward Said, those who devoted their lives to issues like air and water pollution basically seemed to occupy another planet.

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