Solutions | For a sustainable and desirable future

Global Change: Intersection of Nature and Culture

The purpose of this forum is to explore big questions about society and environmental change, such as

What does the good life mean in the 21st Century?
How do personal choices and values play a role in this conversation?
What do the natural sciences have to say about the way our world is changing?
What do the social sciences and humanities have to say about the ways that the social and the cultural intersect with questions surrounding environment?
How can we address environmental and social challenges at the same time?
How is environmentalism changing in response to these pressures?
What’s the role of higher education in facilitating sustainability and environmental literacy?

There are a lot of environment blogs that assess daily political battles on energy and climate. Others take a “100 things you can do to save the environment” approach. And many others provide a laundry list of daily news, from solar panels to tree frogs to Copenhagen to sea ice, and so on. Those approaches are useful and helpful, especially for fast-moving matters like policy. But they sometimes lose sight of the big questions we need to be asking in our quest to develop a more ecologically sustainable and socially just world. The blogosphere delivers a great deal, but it also fails in making important interdisciplinary connections that foster a more-sophisticated, substantive analysis.

globalchangeblog.com forges a new path (to visit the blog, click here). I want to analyze environmental change by focusing on the interaction between nature and culture, showcasing big ideas from all disciplines —sociology/anthropology, ethics, ecology and other natural sciences, psychology, history, political science, ethnic studies, religion, literature, visual and performing arts, and so on.

I hope this forum will provide the creative space to attract the best and most-interesting ideas for how we might get to a more ecologically sustainable and socially just world. I hope that the constellation of posts can lead to a more useful integration of ideas around these big questions.

Join this group to read posts and participate in the discussion.

Can tracking consumer carbon emissions be a solution for bringing developing nations into international greenhouse gas agreements?

Phil Camill

In the latest post, The hidden global CO2 emissions of consumerism, new research suggests that CO2 emissions associated with consumption in wealthy, developed countries accounts for a significant fraction of emissions in developing nations. As the authors conclude, acknowledging this might be a first step to developing better relations with China and India about greenhouse gas reductions:

Is fear plus collective action an effective climate communication solution?

Phil Camill

That's the latest question explored on the blog.

Land use solutions: Conservation funding slows land consumption

Phil Camill

Robert McDonald and colleagues have an interesting paper in this week's PLoS ONE describing land use consumption patterns in 274 U.S. cities over the last decade. Turns out (not surprisingly) that conservation funding slows per-capita land use.

"Bloom Box" fuel cells: A viable electricity solution?

Phil Camill

As I post about on the blog, 60 Minutes created a stir with a new feature on a new kind of fuel cell that is apparently on the verge of mass production. If you are not familiar with fuel cells, they are devices that extract electrons from a fuel (usually hydrogen or natural gas) to generate electricity without the need for a large power plant.

Ensuring Transparency by "Evolving" the Ideal World Design.

Jan Hearthstone

Ensuring Transparency by "Evolving" the Ideal World Design.
online: www.modelearth.org/princmodsus.html

There exist many notions of what a sustainable world should look like.
It would be possible to accommodate any (provably) sustainable life-styles of varying degree of complexity on Earth--all those could exist in the world without interfering with each other, and without interfering unduly with other life forms that share the Earth with humanity.

It would be possible to model this situation, perhaps not even needing any extensive computer modeling--"gedanken experiments" (note 1) might even be enough, at least at the start; computer modeling might perhaps be used for proving that the more complex sustainable life-styles would, indeed, be sustainable.

Marine protected areas continue to look like good solutions to some challenges facing oceans

Phil Camill

There's a new article in PLoS that I write about on the blog today.

The good news: It looks like marine protected areas might be able to slow the decline of corals in addition to their better-known effects of increasing fish populations.

Is reducing meat consumption a solution to rising world population?

Phil Camill

That's one of the questions posed in several articles in the latest special issue of Science magazine. Check out the following blog post for more.

The humanities are key to environmental messaging

Phil Camill

Check out the latest blog post for one solution to climate warming messaging.

Does your personality hold clues about your environmental consciousness?

Phil Camill

A new study suggests that's the case: If you are agreeable or open to new experiences, you are more likely to show concern for environmental issues.

We're Just Too Productive

Submitted by CarolynAllen on Tue, 01/12/2010 - 15:39

Part of our problem is that humans are just too productive -- we're changing the landscape too much, working too many hours, making too much money, etc. And at the same time we're neglecting proper sleep, caring for our children, continuing education, citizenship participation...etc.

So my solution is that we cut down the workweek so that we have time for rearing our children and caring for our health and family, we don't destroy the environment at this rapid pace...and we consume less because we have less money burning a hole in our pockets.

Capitalism with a Human Face: A Proposal for the Establishment of a Sustainable Capitalism.

Submitted by hearthstone on Sun, 01/24/2010 - 00:49

Capitalism with a Human Face:
A Proposal for the Establishment of a Sustainable Capitalism.
online: http://www.modelearth.org/modest.html

Preventing a Ton of Cure: Disaster Preparedness.

Submitted by hearthstone on Fri, 01/22/2010 - 14:07

Preventing a Ton of Cure:
Disaster Preparedness.
online: http://www.modelearth.org/art01.html

Disasters, be they natural or human made, do occur--they have been occurring all throughout human history, they occur even nowadays; they are nothing new to us. They do not surprise us.

Grassroots Government: The World's Ombudsman.

Submitted by hearthstone on Fri, 01/22/2010 - 15:16

Grassroots Government: The World's Ombudsman.
online: http://www.modelearth.org/world-gov.html

Today most people are not represented in their government properly, if at all, regardless where this might be in the world.

Even in the most advanced democracies of the "first world" countries it might take a long time before wrongs being committed on minorities are addressed to a satisfaction; Wrongs committed on individuals might never be considered at all, in most instances, mostly due to the impossibility of people having an equal access to justice.

An open letter to the Obamas.

Submitted by hearthstone on Mon, 01/18/2010 - 16:58

Hearthstone
ModelEarth.Org
P.O.B. 2182
Sebastopol
CA 95473

modelearth [at] gmail [dot] com

12.30.2008

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Obama,

I wish that you are well!

If we, the people, were really interested in establishing a lasting peace in the world, we would spend more on ways that would achieve peace non-violently than what we spend on the military!

Haiti's story

Phil Camill

On the blog, I write about the social-environmental history that needs to be explored to understand why crises like poverty, AIDS, mudslides, and this week’s earthquake have been so devastating to the Haitian people.

Bottom line: Haiti is battling not only mudslides and earthquakes, but a colonial legacy that has predisposed its people to one devastating crisis after another.

Please consider helping with the humanitarian relief for earthquake victims:

Working through the challenges of population and climate change

Phil Camill

Suzanne Petroni has an interesting paper in the latest issue of Population and Environment that explores some big questions about population and climate warming:

(1) [D]oes the right of the community to live on a healthy planet trump the right of the individual to decide for him or herself, without external pressure, their own desired level of fertility?

Here's a cool idea: Install white roofs

Phil Camill

As I mention in a new post on the blog, if we were to install white roofs, it's possible to cool global climate, as a paper coming out in GRL suggests.

White roofs reflect more sunlight and cool buildings. Averaged over all urban areas in the world, the urban heat island effect declines by 33%, causing maximum and minimum daily temperatures to decrease by 0.6 and 0.3 degrees C, respectively.

Local towns taking on the sustainability initiative--Share your experiences

Phil Camill

This past semester, I designed a new course at Bowdoin where senior Environmental Studies students and I were a team of consultants working with our two local towns to develop climate action plans, including greenhouse gas inventories and reductions scenarios. The students did a terrific and extremely professional job. There is now a group called Brunswick and Topsham Citizens for Sustainability.

Share your green jobs stories

Phil Camill

Yesterday, I posted about Auden Schendler's column at Grist.

There is a lot of interest among students/graduates in green job opportunities. But in many instances, it's not yet clear what constitutes green jobs.

As I mentioned in the post, what I like about Auden’s column is his emphasis on not waiting for sustainable jobs to slap you in the face. Rather, work to turn any job—your life—into a greener enterprise. Those entrepreneurial skills are tremendously important.