Archive for October, 2009
| Newer Entries »Campus Sustainability 3.0
Wednesday, October 14th, 2009
Leith Sharp has been one of the folks leading the charge on campus sustainability over the past decade. In her latest article Higher education: the quest for a sustainable campus in Sustainability: Science, Practice, and Policy (open access), she assesses some of that history from her work at Harvard and offers a few thoughts on what the next wave might look like.
Posted in sustainability | No Comments »
Remaking American Environmentalism
Tuesday, October 13th, 2009
This piece1,2 by writer Jenny Price in Environmental History (subscription required) is an interesting take on the ongoing battle for the soul of environmentalism. I recommend getting access to and reading the entire article.
A few excerpts:
Environmentalism, in sum, has taken some very serious hits. Many of its most familiar and cherished icons have come under a veil of suspicion. Thoreau? Inspiring—but urged us to see nature as the antidote to the places we live. Yosemite? Spectacular, and essential for many reasons—and a site of violent conquest. And a white refuge from the troubles of cities. And culturally constructed to boot. Silent Spring? Indispensable to the ensuing 1960s and 1970s legislation—but apocalyptic, the reapers complain, with a millennial, paralyzing vision of nature as the pure true world that humans by definition violate. What would have happened with the civil rights movement, they ask, if Martin Luther King had given an “I have a nightmare” instead of an “I have a dream” speech? Ditto for the Cuyahoga River fire in Cleveland in 1969 and the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska in 1989. The earth from space? We may all live on one planet together, but environmental justice advocates have pointed out also that we are not entirely all in this together….
Tags: environmentalism
Posted in environmental history, environmentalism, nature and culture | No Comments »
News roundup: Electric cars
Tuesday, October 13th, 2009
Lots in the news recently about the development of electric cars and charging stations:
- France to spend $2.2 billion on electric car charging stations
- Discord Over Regulation of Car Charging
- GM Nears Moment of Truth for Chevy Volt as Green Halo
- The fight to control California’s EV infrastructure
- How electric cars will drive solar power
Tags: electric car, green car
Posted in technology, transportation | No Comments »
Defining the good life in Baltimore
Tuesday, October 13th, 2009
Defining and describing what constitutes “the good life” for individuals and communities has been a vexing challenge for social scholars…
So begins a recent article1,2 in Environment and Behavior (subscription required)
…[T]he term “life satisfaction”, which comes from the psychological literature, refers to the cognitive evaluation of one’s happiness or subjective wellbeing and involves comparing the fulfillment of individual needs, goals, and aspirations to a meaningful standard.
One unique aspect of this study was that the team used surveys to assess people’s life satisfaction at two different scales: (1) their own lives and (2) their neighborhoods.
Bottom line:
- Income and home ownership mattered more to individual satisfaction compared to satisfaction with neighborhoods.
- In contrast, neighborhood satisfaction was more strongly correlated with social capital (shared knowledge, norms, rules, and networks that facilitate collective experience) and satisfaction with the natural environment in the neighborhood.
- These results corroborate a large body of prior research indicating that wealth alone is not the only explanation for life satisfaction–our communities and environments matter as well.
- Given that more people now live in urban environments than at any point in human history, this speaks to the need for (re)developing cities to promote green spaces and social networks.
1Vemuri, A., et al. (2009) A Tale of Two Scales: Evaluating the Relationship Among Life Satisfaction, Social Capital, Income, and the Natural Environment at Individual and Neighborhood Levels in Metropolitan Baltimore. Environment and Behavior, (Online First edition).
2Bowdoin people can link to the article here.
photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kevinl8888/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Tags: Baltimore, happiness, urban
Posted in race and class, social science, urban | No Comments »
Your pancakes are safe from climate change
Monday, October 12th, 2009
Believe it or not, there is serious scientific debate about the fate of U.S. maple syrup production with climate warming. Some studies have used data showing that sap production is inversely related to temperature to argue that a warmer world bodes ill for U.S. syrup production. Others have focused on changes in temperature and precipitation, suggesting that shifting conditions in the Northeast might decrease sap production. Still others (Iverson et al. 2002) suggest that sugar maple trees might migrate into Canada with warming, leaving the New England market high and dry.
In the online first edition1,2 of Climatic Change (subscription required) Christopher Skinner and colleagues coupled climate models to plant physiology models to determine, explicitly, how sapflow up tree stems might change with warming.
Their results suggest that the optimal timing for sap collection will shift a full month earlier by 2100. Reductions in New England would occur only if sap collectors maintained their current collection schedules rather than adapting to a few weeks earlier.
Thus, sap collection season shifts earlier but there appears to be no net loss of sapflow. Maine stands to increase the number of sapflow days, so we might see maple syrup production redistribute across New England.
Bottom line: It looks like you can toss your plan to hoard maple syrup from Costco or shift to Aunt Jemima (which is corn syrup). And come visit Maine for that pancake breakfast.
1Skinner, C.B., et al. (2009) Implications of twenty-first century climate change on Northeastern United States maple syrup production: impacts and adaptations. Climatic Change (online first edition)
2Bowdoin people can link to article here.
Tags: climate change, maple syrup
Posted in climate change science, food and agriculture | No Comments »
Are Conventional Farmers Always Conventional?
Monday, October 12th, 2009
That’s the question posed by John Fairweather and colleagues in the latest issue1,2 of Rural Sociology (subscription required).
When we think of food production alternatives, we often think in terms of binaries—-large, global, industrial, ecologically destructive agribusiness vs. small, local, ecologically benign organic farming. This team argues that there are reasons to suspect this dichotomy is too simplistic.
Using New Zealand as a case study, they found from previous work that food standards systems (like organic) are often driven by supermarkets and other demand-side market forces. That is, farmers respond to consumer preferences by voluntarily improving agricultural practices in order to take advantage of these emerging niche markets.
In their latest article, they found that “conventional” farmers were a diverse group. When asked to rank their agreement with a series of questions assessing sustainable knowledge and practice, conventional farmers ended up falling along a spectrum of pro-environmental to non-environmental. The pro-environmental percentage of conventional farmers turned out to be a significant fraction of three ag sectors:
- sheep and beef (79%)
- dairy (44%)
- horticulture (39%)
Bottom line: These results suggest that conventional farmers may, in fact, be a more heterogeneous group than is currently recognized:
Posted in food and agriculture | 1 Comment »
DIY climate modeling
Monday, October 12th, 2009
There was a short news story tucked in a recent Nature issue (2009, 461:581) showcasing a new breed of “instant” climate models that package the features of general circulation models (GCMs) into a real-time, easy-to-use web browser environment that anyone can try.
Check out the models at Climate Interactive.
These models allow folks to see the impications of different CO2 emission reduction scenarios immediately, helping to alleviate a problem identified by John Sterman in a recent Science article: People have bad mental models that way underestimate the magnitude and timing required for CO2 reductions.
Posted in climate change science, policy | No Comments »
A new conversation about environmental change
Saturday, October 10th, 2009
Welcome to Global Change: Intersection of Nature and Culture at globalchangeblog.com. 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 — What is nature, how it is implicated in our lives, who benefits and who loses from environmental harm, what issues of power and identity are invested in environmental discourses, how do we make policy or economic decisions given these questions?
- 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. When the information deluge mainly contains narrowly focused stories, factoids, and policy play-by-play, there’s often no theoretical context in which to analyze these things as part of a bigger picture. And let’s face it, how much air time do the humanities and civil society get relative to science and policy? 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. 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.
I’d also like the forum to contain a dose of useful, practical information—not so much “100 things to save the environment” but ideas to help people become more personally invested and informed. Check out the post Do our daily routines put our health at risk? for an example.
Everyone is an important part of this conversation. I encourage you to subscribe to the blog (which is easy to do using the RSS and email subscribe options on the main page), and please send me any interesting articles you come across. If you wish to write a guest post, please feel free to drop me a line with your ideas.
All the best,
Phil Camill
Rusack Associate Professor of Biology and Environmental Studies
Program Director, Environmental Studies
Bowdoin College
Brunswick, Maine
6700 College Station
Brunswick, ME 04011
pcamill@bowdoin.edu
P. Camill’s website
Tags: culture, environmental studies, environmentalism, nature
Posted in nature and culture | No Comments »
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