On April 14, the Log Lunch community gathered to learn from Eban Goodstein ’82. Eban worked as an economics professor for 20 years, at Lewis & Clark and Skidmore Colleges, led the National Teach-In on Global Warming Solutions at over 2500 educational institutions across the country from 2006-2009, and now serves as the director of Bard College’s Center for Environmental Policy.
Eban kicked off the talk by noting that Log Lunch started the year before he came to Williams, in 1977. “A lot of very powerful activists have come out of Log Lunch, and hopefully there will be more,” he said, describing the coming years as a “hinge moment” in human history, with an urgent need for climate action. “Regardless of what we do to the planet, there will be people living here in ten thousand years,” he said. “People will be looking back at these 3 decades to see what we did or didn’t do.”
Eban described activism as a question of one’s personal relationship to injustice. Many people have the privilege to simply ignore injustice, while others engage with it passively, donating some money to charity and occasionally engaging in volunteer work. Activism, Eban said, entails making engagement with injustice central to one’s life, and activating others to do the same. As someone who has decades of experience with this kind of engagement, he encouraged audience members not to wait to do the same. “Activists are the scarcest resource on the planet, and perhaps most important,” Eban said.
The Log Lunch chefs prepared a delicious spring meal of lemony orzo stew with chickpeas, spinach, and dill, Greek olive bread, shawarma-roasted parsnips with yogurt, and baklava.
Log Lunch is a CES program hosted every Friday at noon. During Log Lunch, a vegetarian meal prepared by Williams students is served, followed by a talk on an environmental topic. Speakers are drawn from both the student body and faculty of Williams, as well as from local, national, and international organizations. Learn more here.
BY CHARLOTTE STAUDENMAYER ’25