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The Academy’s 2005th Stated Meeting on February 12, 2014, featured members of the Catalyst Collaborative@MIT performing a staged reading of Chantal Bilodeau’s play SILA. Set on Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic, the play features a climate scientist, an Inuit activist and her daughter, an Inuit elder, two Canadian Coast Guard officers, and polar bears all grappling with the rapidly changing environment.

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The reading was followed by a panel discussion with Naomi Oreskes (Professor of the History of Science and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University), Robert L. Jaffe (Jane and Otto Morningstar Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and playwright Chantal Bilodeau (Artistic Director of The Arctic Cycle) about the competing interests shaping the future of our planet. The program included a welcome from Alan Lightman (Professor of the Practice of the Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and an introduction of the staged reading from Debra Wise (Artistic Director of the Underground Railway Theater and Codirector of the Catalyst Collaborative@MIT).