Rifkin: The Empathetic Civilization
February 3rd, 2010
I’m looking forward to reading Rifkin’s new book. If it turns out to be as good as the back cover implies, there will be a lot on the intersection of nature and culture to think about:
Never has the world seemed so completely united-in the form of communication, commerce, and culture-and so savagely torn apart-in the form of war, financial meltdown, global warming, and even the migration of diseases.
No matter how much we put our minds to the task of meeting the challenges of a rapidly globalizing world, the human race seems to continually come up short, unable to muster the collective mental resources to truly “think globally and act locally.” In his most ambitious book to date, bestselling social critic Jeremy Rifkin shows that this disconnect between our vision for the world and our ability to realize that vision lies in the current state of human consciousness. The very way our brains are structured disposes us to a way of feeling, thinking, and acting in the world that is no longer entirely relevant to the new environments we have created for ourselves.
The human-made environment is rapidly morphing into a global space, yet our existing modes of consciousness are structured for earlier eras of history, which are just as quickly fading away. Humanity, Rifkin argues, finds itself on the cusp of its greatest experiment to date: refashioning human consciousness so that human beings can mutually live and flourish in the new globalizing society.
In essence, this shift in consciousness is based upon reaching out to others. But to resist this change in human relations and modes of thinking, Rifkin contends, would spell ineptness and disaster in facing the new challenges around us. As the forces of globalization accelerate, deepen, and become ever more complex, the older faith-based and rational forms of consciousness are likely to become stressed, and even dangerous, as they attempt to navigate a world increasingly beyond their reach and control. Indeed, the emergence of this empathetic consciousness has implications for the future that will likely be as profound and far-reaching as when Enlightenment philosophers upended faith-based consciousness with the canon of reason.
Update: A review by Arianna Huffington
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Global change is causing forests to grow more
February 3rd, 2010
Decades of research have shown that increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can cause trees to grow better. However, what we don’t know as well is how much rising temperatures and CO2 impact forest growth over longer time scales, such as the entire 20th century.
This is a harder question to answer for one big reason: When you look back that long, you have to contend with natural regeneration cycle of individual trees. Forest processes—such as treefall gaps opening the forest and causing increased sunlight to spur growth— become important in controlling the growth dynamics of forests (what ecologists call stand-level growth dynamics). If you cut down a tree and look at a cross section of tree rings, you can often see multiple periods of light-induced growth spurts (wide rings) over the lifespan of an individual.
In a forthcoming article1 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (open access), Sean McMahon and colleagues investigated the question of long-term forest response to global change in Maryland forests.
Using statistical techniques, they were able to factor out the messiness of the stand-level dynamics to look for effects caused mainly by a changing physical environment.
They found that 80% of the trees grew more than you would expect by stand-level growth dynamics alone. However, they found it difficult to pin this trend on any single environmental factor, concluding that temperature, increased lengths of growing seasons, and increased CO2 were likely synergistic drivers.
This is an interesting result because it contrasts with the results of elevated CO2 experiments, which show that forest growth typically slows a few years after trees are subjected to experimentally raised CO2. What those studies are finding is that nitrogen in soils could become limiting and essentially shut off extra growth caused by CO2 fertilization.
The implications are fairly significant: Either the Maryland site is unusually nutrient rich, and we have to discount the ability to generalize from that one study, or the elevated CO2 experiments may not fully capture the dynamics of how forests responding to climate change. This should spur an interesting debate.
1McMahon, S.M. (in press) Evidence for a recent increase in forest growth. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
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Is a post-Copenhagen roadmap emerging?
February 1st, 2010
Over the past few years, there have been a couple of major approaches for dealing with climate change:
- Use political tools to set emissions targets (e.g., 80% reduction by 2050);
- Invest heavily in green technology to drive green energy prices lower. Only then will these technologies take hold. Carbon reductions are an important byproduct but not the main goal.
Of course these are not mutually exclusive, but they might as well be given the way they have played out on the political stage.
With a lot of people down on political solutions to deal with climate change, strong advocates of the latter approach may now gain the upper hand. Folks like Shellenberger and Nordhaus have been arguing that green energy needs to be produced as quickly and cheaply as possible—forget all of the games with cap and trade or carbon taxes. Tom Friedman has also argued the need for swift action on energy, while also endorsing political solutions like carbon taxes.
If you look for areas that are gaining or have the potential to gain traction, there seem to be two levers that may work:
- the link between fossil fuel dependency, climate change, economic stability, and national security;
- the fact that China is eating our lunch with respect to clean energy development.
Both of these general concerns have attracted Republican support for green energy and climate change mitigation, including Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC).
This may be a signal of potential game changers and the clearest path forward that we’ve seen in awhile.
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Posted in: climate economics, conflict, energy, policy, risk analysis, solutions | No Comments »
Why do people vary so much in their environmental attitudes?
February 1st, 2010
New research by Jacob Hirsh in a forthcoming article in Environmental Psychology1 suggests that your personality may hold a big clue:
Excerpts (citations omitted):
…[E]nvironmentalism has been examined from the perspective of the “Big
Five” taxonomy of personality traits, which describes variation in human personality across the five broad dimensions of Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism, and Openness to Experience. These broad trait dimensions can be used to predict more specific attitudes and value orientations. Two of these traits, Agreeableness and Openness, have emerged as significant predictors of pro-environmental values. These findings are consistent with theoretical models that relate pro-environmental attitudes to higher levels of empathy and self-transcendence, which appear to be related to Agreeableness and Openness, respectively. Individuals who are more empathic and less self-focused appear more likely to develop a personal connection with nature, which in turn predicts their pro-environmental attitudes. Indeed, developing such an emotional affinity toward the natural environment can bolster one’s motives for environmental protection.
Hirsh tested this idea with a much larger sample of people than studied previously—about 3,000 German adults. Bottom line: These predictions were confirmed: If you are an agreeable person open to new experiences, you are more likely to be concerned about the environment. There was an unexpected twist that neurotic and conscientious people also showed a slight tendency towards environmental concern as well.
What’s more agreeable than German guys dancing in Lederhosen?
1Hirsh, J.B. Personality and Environmental Concern, Journal of Environmental Psychology (2010), doi: 10.1016/j.jenvp.2010.01.004
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Is There an Ecological Unconscious?
February 1st, 2010
That’s the title of a recent article in the NY Times by Daniel Smith. Another example of why it is useful to link Environmental Studies and Psychology in higher education.
Excerpts:
Last August, the American Psychological Association released a 230-page report titled “Interface Between Psychology and Global Climate Change.” News-media coverage of the report concentrated on the habits of human behavior and the habits of thought that contribute to global warming. This emphasis reflected the intellectual dispositions of the task-force members who wrote the document — seven out of eight were scientists who specialize in decision research and environmental-risk management — as well as the document’s stated purpose. “We must look at the reasons people are not acting,” Janet Swim, a Penn State psychologist and the chairwoman of the task force, said, “in order to understand how to get people to act.”
Yet all the attention paid to the behavioral and cognitive barriers to safeguarding the environment — topics of acute interest to policy makers and activists — disguised the fact that a significant portion of the document addressed the supposed emotional costs of ecological decline: anxiety, despair, numbness, “a sense of being overwhelmed or powerless,” grief. It also disguised the unusual background of the eighth member of the task force, Thomas Doherty, a clinical psychologist in Portland, Ore. Doherty runs a private therapeutic practice called Sustainable Self and is the most prominent American advocate of a growing discipline known as “ecopsychology.”
…. Philosophically, the field depends on an ideal of ecological awareness or communion against which deficits can then be measured. And so it often seems to rest on assuming as true what it is trying to prove to be true: being mentally healthy requires being ecologically attuned, but being ecologically attuned requires being mentally healthy. And yet, in its ongoing effort to gain legitimacy, ecopsychology is at least looking for ways to establish standards. Recently, The American Psychologist, the journal of the American Psychological Association, invited the members of the organization’s climate-change task force to submit individual papers; Thomas Doherty is taking the opportunity to develop his categorization of responses to environmental problems. His model, which he showed me an early draft of, makes distinctions that are bound to be controversial: at the pathological end of the spectrum, for example, after psychotic delusions, he places “frank denial” of environmental issues. The most telling feature of the model, however, may be how strongly it equates mental health with the impulse to “promote connection with nature” — in other words, with a deeply ingrained ecological outlook. Critics would likely point out that ecopsychologists smuggle a worldview into what should be the value-neutral realm of therapy. Supporters would likely reply that, like Bateson, ecopsychologists are not sneaking in values but correcting a fundamental error in how we conceive of the mind: to understand what it is to be whole, we must first explain what is broken.
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Trees: Another way to increase global methane?
February 1st, 2010
Methane is a potent greenhouse gas. Unlike CO2, which is produced by the aerobic (in the presence of oxygen) breakdown of organic matter, methane is produced by the breakdown of organic matter in anaerobic environments, such as livestock rumens, wetland soils, landfills, and rice paddies.
When we think of methane production, we don’t usually think about trees, but it looks like they may facilitate methane to the atmosphere. How, you might ask, since most trees live in well-aerated soils?
In a forthcoming article1 in Geophysical Research Letters, Andrew Rice and colleagues show that trees in lowland, swampy areas actually conduct methane produced in soils up their stems and out their leaves, making trees an effective methane chimney.
We’ve known for years that marsh and bog plants do this, but nobody’s really looked at trees before. The trees themselves are not making the methane (that’s done by soil bacteria), but they appear to do two things that increase the overall flux (movement) of methane to the atmosphere: (1) tree stems provide a quick methane escape route from soils to the atmosphere and (2) trees leak root exudates (small organic molecules), which could be an organic carbon source for microbes that make methane.
In this study, they put bags around aboveground tree biomass to catch and measure methane, so it’s clear that #1 happens. However, #2 needs further study. You could measure it by dosing a tree with radiocarbon (14CO2) and then seeing if that gets turned into sugars by photosynthesis and eventually leaked out of roots, ultimately turning into 14C methane (14CH4) that is transported up the tree stems.
How much methane? About 60 teragrams (1012g), or about 10% of the global production each year. Big enough to pay attention to.
1Rice, A.L. et al. (in press) Emissions of anaerobically produced methane by trees. Geophysical Research Letters.
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Haiti’s story
January 13th, 2010
Little good news is coming out of Haiti these days. There’s a deep 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.
I have written a bit about this history for one of the book projects I’m working on. Below are a few excerpts, but before reading further, please consider helping with the humanitarian relief for earthquake victims:
- Doctors Without Borders USA
- AmeriCares
- An additional list of aid agencies can be found at the NY Times.
Thoughts on addressing population and climate change in a just and ethical manner
January 12th, 2010
That’s the title of a new article1 by Suzanne Petroni in the latest issue of Population and Environment (subscription required). She begins by acknowledging the complex history between these issues:
There is, in the field of population and reproductive health, a present debate around the merits and deficiencies of bringing the issue of global population growth back to the public agenda. Many see the current attention to the issue of climate change as an opening in which to make the case that global warming can not be alleviated or reversed without slowing population growth. They believe that linking population growth and climate change will help governments to see the exigency of the matter, and will place family planning back into the political realm as an urgent matter of national and environmental security….
But others worry that focusing on the environmental impacts of demographic change places at risk the hard-fought and long-developed global consensus that individual rights and empowerment are what matters most in fostering just and sustainable development. They fear that a renewed focus on the impacts of the growth of our global population poses a risk of drawing the international community back to numbers-driven policies and programs, which have not always prioritized individual interests…
- [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?
- Does the United States, which emits a hugely disproportionate amount of greenhouse gases, have a right to suggest that other countries reduce their rates of population growth in order to somehow compensate for our profligate and consumptive lifestyles?
- How can we best balance a duty to future generations with the values of individual freedom and equality among the planet’s current occupants?
- And, while coercive means of population control have been widely condemned in most parts of the world, does making the ‘‘population-climate change connection’’ run the risk of countries seeing population control as an ‘‘easy fix’’ to the environmental challenges we face?
In light of these huge questions, what are her recommendations?
Posted in: behavior, gender, health, population | No Comments »
Can we alter climate by installing white roofs?
January 11th, 2010
When reviewing the most popular words of 2009, I was surprised to see that “albedo” didn’t crack the top 5—Tweet, Obama, H1N1, Stimulus, and Vampire. I bet you were equally shocked.
Albedo is a simple concept—the reflectivity of a landscape—but it’s hugely important in understanding how the surface of the Earth impacts climate. As we saw in a recent post, things like thawing sea ice, northward advancing treeline, and asphalt paving all darken landscapes, causing more solar radiation to be absorbed and temperatures to climb—one of the reasons for the so-called urban heat island effect.
So what would happen if we were to install white roofs? In a forthcoming article1 in Geophysical Research Letters (subscription required), Keith Oleson and colleagues use biophysical models to address this.
Their answer: 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.
At face value, this sounds great. But, there’s a potential hidden cost of cool buildings—heating. Interestingly, they found that white roofs caused space heating to increase more than air conditioner use declined, suggesting that energy use might actually increase with white roofs!
1Oleson, K. et al. (in press) The effects of white roofs on urban temperature in a global climate model. Geophysical Research Letters.
Related post: New ideas about how changing vegetation at high latitudes can cause climate warming to accelerate
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Posted in: behavior, climate adaptation, climate change science, energy, solutions, sustainability, technology | No Comments »
This week’s good ideas in campus sustainability: 1/11/10
January 11th, 2010
This week’s spotlight is on the University of Minnesota and the University of Florida. Also, sustainability education makes USA Today and the NY Times.
1. U of M Energy Conservation Campaign Collects 10,000 Energy Pledges
Growing sustainability from the bottom-up in any community is challenging. Here’s one way that the Golden Gophers are working on it:
Getting 10,000 people at the University of Minnesota to agree on any one subject is difficult. But 10,000 students, faculty and staff do agree on one thing: saving energy on campus is important.
The U of M has just met its goal of collecting 10,000 energy conservation pledges from students, faculty and staff as part of the It All Adds Up campus energy conservation campaign. The 10,000 pledge marked was topped early Thursday after a flurry of pledges came in response to a university-wide e-mail from President Robert Bruininks asking the Twin Cities Campus to take the pledge.
The university rolled out It All Adds Up last spring in an effort to increase campus awareness about how each person at the U could play a part in saving energy. The energy conservation pledge asks individuals to take seemingly small actions – like turning off lights or powering down computers at the end of the day – with the understanding that if each member of the 80,000 person campus community did those small actions, it would all add up.
2. One Less Car Wraps As Alternative Transportation Increases
Here’s another bottom-up approach, and the FL Gators get a gold star for doing it with one of the hardest behavioral modifications—driving:
The second annual One Less Car challenge was a success, with nearly 1,000 people participating. More than 100 teams represented students, faculty, and staff from departments and units across campus. Together, One Less Car participants avoided over 260,000 miles of driving during the challenge. Through alternative transportation commutes, such as busing, biking, and walking, approximately 246,370 pounds of carbon dioxide were kept from entering the atmosphere.
The teams that used alternative transportation for the most miles were: The Office for Student Financial Affairs, The Florida Museum of Natural History, and The College of Dentistry. Final prizes were awarded to the teams with the highest average points per member: Extreme Backroads, Los Tamales Calientes, Radical Gainesville, Geography, and No glass on the bike lanes. Individuals also earned prizes for logging the most trips and avoiding the most miles of driving. Final prizes included: lunch from Satchel’s Pizza, bike tune-ups, Hippodrome Tickets, Gator Dining meal coupons, and tickets to the Butterfly exhibit at the Florida Museum of Natural History.
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For more information: AASHE bulletin 1/1/10
Posted in: behavior, higher education, solutions, sustainability, transportation | No Comments »
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