CASAR'S theme for the 2022-2023 academic year will be “Environments East and West," which will offer a framework to explore and help ameliorate the recent devastation in Beirut and the environmental degradation in Lebanon and the Middle East. Projects to directly address local and regional environmental issues will take place in conjunction with studies of climate change globally and in the Americas. These studies will include panels, courses and talks on subjects such as wildfires in the American West, the destruction of the Amazon rain forest, the politics of water in the Middle East and the Americas, extraction economies and the future of petroleum, environmental inequities based on class, race and gender, and other related issues. Current projects under CASAR's theme include a global humanities institute on “Climate Injustice and Questions of Scale," organized by the University of Texas and funded by a Mellon grant from the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, which CASAR received along with humanities centers at Texas, Arizona State, the University of Sydney, the University of Pretoria and Carnegie-Mellon. CASAR will also be supporting initiatives locally and at AUB such as a new working group on the environment headed by Najat Saliba, Professor of Chemistry and director of the Nature Conservation Center, and Khaddit Beirut, a local grassroots group documenting the causes for and helping to alleviate the destruction from the August 2020 explosion in Beirut.