Archive for November, 2009
« Older Entries | Newer Entries »Environmental literacy in higher education—Overview
Sunday, November 22nd, 2009
In the next series of posts, I’d like to continue the conversation about environmental literacy initiated in the context of why people don’t engage climate warming. In that discussion, EL was mostly framed as a matter of knowledge about climate warming and the earth system:
- People don’t know enough about how human and environmental systems work and interact.
- Personal actions don’t match required solutions.
- Bad mental models facilitate underestimation of the problem and the time scale to deal with it.
- Environmental literacy is affected by how we structure disciplines in higher education
Let’s build on this last point and broaden the focus to higher education and environmentalism.
Many thanks in advance to friends and colleagues, most notably Matt Klingle (Bowdoin), Joe Bandy (Bowdoin), David Hecht (Bowdoin), Kim Smith (Carleton), Jen Everett (DePauw), and David Orr (Oberlin), who helped shape my thinking about this issue.
Related post: Why don’t people engage climate warming? Problem 1: Environmental literacy
Posted in environmental literacy, environmental studies, environmentalism, higher education | 4 Comments »
Africa: Agro imperialism’s final frontier?
Saturday, November 21st, 2009
In an article titled, “Is There Such a Thing as Agro-Imperialism?” in the NY Times Sunday Magazine, Andrew Rice writes about how wealthy nations are now staking out land in the developing world—notably Africa—in order to feed their own future populations. Let me say up front that if increasing foreign investment in domestic agriculture can pull African nations out of poverty, then it’s worth a serious look.
However, there’s a related issue that’s worth noting: Sooner or later, the combination of (1) rising populations, (2) higher per-capita meat consumption, and (3) possible shifts to more sustainable meat production (pasture fed)—with its attendant land requirements and higher costs—will likely force the developed world to export more of its own food production to the developing world, where land and labor are cheap.
This could lead to potentially large ecological damage if the modern industrialized agricultural model—rather than sustainable modes of production— is also exported.
There are several conversations that need to happen:
- Who benefits from foreign cash flows, especially in countries with abysmal records of transparency, corrupt governments, and land tenure rights? It’s not clear it will be the farmers.
- Should the developed world reduce its meat consumption to accommodate higher-yielding agriculture within its own geographic borders before it turns to the developing world—who has difficulty feeding its own people— for help.
- Is this even feasible in food-insecure nations? As stated in the article, “The idea that one country would go to another country…and lease some land, and expect that the rice produced there would be made available to them if there’s a food crisis in that host country, is ludicrous.”
Excerpts:
Tags: Africa
Posted in food and agriculture | No Comments »
Breathing Earth—Watch real-time changes in emissions, population
Friday, November 20th, 2009
One of the challenges of environmental literacy is to help people visualize information so that it’s easy to digest. The Breathing Earth Simulation is a new graphic simulation that allows people to watch the geography of carbon emission, births, and deaths real time.
As you can see from the graphic above, in the short time I watched, world population rose by almost 2000 people, and more than 500,000 tons of CO2 were emitted. Countries glow red every time 1000 tons of CO2 is emitted—about every 5 seconds for the U.S.
This is a good first step, but they could do more. Most people can’t relate directly to tonnage of CO2. 547,000 tons? Is that a lot or not much if you don’t know that Earth’s atmosphere holds 750 billion tons of carbon and annual emissions are ~9 billion tons of carbon? Emissions masses could also be represented in more familiar equivalencies—e.g., numbers of Empire State Buildings, total world grain harvests, number of cars piled on top of one another, combined weight of a group of people, etc.
Related post: Why don’t people engage climate change? Problem 1: Environmental Literacy
Posted in environmental literacy | No Comments »
Good Guide—Learn what product labels don’t always tell you about the things you buy
Friday, November 20th, 2009
There’s a new guide to shopping that looks interesting. It’s called Good Guide, and it helps people learn more about what’s in their products that might not be healthy–to you, the environment, or society.
It’s easy to click on many different product types—from food to personal products to air fresheners to toys. For example, ever wonder about different kinds of mac and cheese?
Here’s more information about them:
What chemicals are in your baby shampoo?
Was sweatshop labor used to make your t-shirt?
What products are the best, and what products should you avoid?
Increasingly, you want to know about the impacts of the products you buy. On your health. On the environment. On society. But unless you’ve got a Ph.D, it is almost impossible to find out the impacts of the products you buy. Until now…
GoodGuide provides the world’s largest and most reliable source of information on the health, environmental, and social impacts of the products in your home.
With GoodGuide, you can:
- Find safe, healthy and green products that protect you and your family
- Search or browse over 70,000 food, toys, personal care, & household products to see what’s really beneath the label
- Use expert advice and recommendations on products to quickly learn the impacts of what you buy
- Find better products and make purchasing decisions based on what’s important to you
- Create a personalized favorites list with the products that are right for you and your family
Related post: Do our daily routines put our health at risk?
Posted in behavior, environmentalism, food and agriculture, organic, shopping guides, solutions | No Comments »
In this week’s issue of Science: Oil shortages in 10 years, peak oil in 20
Friday, November 20th, 2009
I usually don’t pay much attention to discussions of peak oil because of the significant challenges and huge uncertainties in predicting it. Then I moved to New England where home heating with oil is insanely expensive. As anyone in Maine can tell you, it really makes you attuned to price shocks.
Richard Kerr describes1 a recent report from the UK Energy Research Centre, which takes a middle ground between those who think that peak oil is imminent and optimists who think that new discoveries will provide lasting supplies.
The verdict? Peak oil in two decades (2030). Shortages in one (2020).
How will this affect our lives? It likely depends on the longevity of the durable goods you own that use oil. If you are a car owner, this might mean one more new car before gas prices go through the roof (unless your next car is electric). If you heat with #2 oil, it means switching to natural gas, propane, wood, or geothermal (or possibly renewable electricity) as soon as your boiler needs replacing, since they often last 20 years or longer.
Oil heating costs and gasoline prices of $4.00+/gallon in 2007-2008 are a painful reminder of the combination of oil shortages and rampant speculation. Unfortunately, this may become the norm in about a decade, provided that our economy rebounds.
And as Amanda Little illustrates in her new book, Power Trip, everything we use that depends on oil, including food, plastics, and the military, may soon cost much more.
1Kerr, R. (2009) Splitting the difference between oil pessimists and optimists. Science 326:1048.
_____
Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gjw/ / CC BY-NC 2.0
Posted in energy | No Comments »
In this week’s issue of Nature: Rethinking global conservation
Thursday, November 19th, 2009
Robert Smith and colleagues argue1 that it’s time to reorganize the approach to conservation in developing nations.
They are critical of academics and NGOs for missing what they think really matters—effective, on-the-ground research and policy development with strong local participation and buy in.
Part of this stems from the focus of academics. They cite as an example the work of Norman Myers and Conservation International, who published a now-famous map of biodiversity hotspots.
The map was marketed as a tool for identifying where conservation investment would have the biggest impact, but this involved playing down both how little was actually known about species distributions and that accurate global data sets on the costs of implementation were not available.
These limitations did not stop the map doing its main job, which was to raise funds and show broadly where Conservation International should target its efforts. In fact, the initiative has been extremely successful and helped to raise an estimated US$750 million for conservation within hot spots. But the hype led many academics to treat priority area setting as simply a question of working out what lives where. This led to many studies that took no account of how plans are implemented.
And part of it stems from traditional structures of NGOs, which, in Smith’s words,
[facilitates] the need to create a sense of urgency among donors lead[ing] to short-term funding and ‘quick and dirty’ projects, which rarely gain local long-term support. Second, NGOs tend to advocate their institutional methodology, rather than allowing local agencies to develop approaches that best match their needs. Third, NGO researchers find it easier to produce articles on broad-scale issues for high-impact journals, which helps to build scientific support for new campaigns, than to write papers about research on local issues.
What’s the new approach they advocate?
Posted in biodiversity science, community conserved areas, nature and culture, social science | No Comments »
Is eating personal?
Wednesday, November 18th, 2009
That’s the question posed by James McWilliams in an op-ed in Monday’s Washington Post.
I gave a talk in South Texas recently on the environmental virtues of a vegetarian diet. As you might imagine, the reception was chilly. In fact, the only applause came during the Q&A period when a member of the audience said that my lecture made him want to go out and eat even more meat. “Plus,” he added, “what I eat is my business — it’s personal.”
I’ve been writing about food and agriculture for more than a decade. Until that evening, however, I’d never actively thought about this most basic culinary question: Is eating personal?
Read the rest of the article. It’s not an entirely new argument, but it adds insight to the current debate on meat-based diets.
_____
Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kitsa_sakurako/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Posted in behavior, food and agriculture | 1 Comment »
Will women bear the brunt of climate change impacts?
Wednesday, November 18th, 2009
Lydia DePillis has an interesting article over at The New Republic based on a new report from the United Nations.
Is climate change gender-neutral? Not according to the U.N. Population Fund, which earlier today released a report arguing that women suffer disproportionately from the impacts of global warming. Especially in developing countries, they can’t flee changes like desertification and sea-level rise as easily as young men, who aren’t as tied to children and households. They’re often caught up in civil conflicts ignited by scarce resources. And they’re more likely to fall victim to diseases caused by wetter weather patterns.
But on the flipside, the report argues, women are also in the best position to help mitigate both the causes and effects of rising temperatures—which is why policies to empower women, like targeted microloans and reproductive healthcare, shouldn’t be treated as separate from climate policy.
…Think of it as Nick Kristof meets Tom Friedman: keeping “women’s issues” separate from “climate issues” is a huge missed opportunity.
I love this conclusion. It’s one of the things that environmental studies (ES) programs in higher education need to focus on—better connections to groups not traditionally affiliated with ES, such as Gender and Women’s Studies, Africana Studies, Psychology, Religion, visual and performing arts, etc. For major environmental challenges like climate warming, everyone needs to be part of this conversation.
_____
Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/oxfam/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Posted in behavior, climate adaptation, environmental justice, gender, higher education | No Comments »
Important social and ecological dimensions to conserving and restoring marine environments
Wednesday, November 18th, 2009
Since the industrialization of fishing in the 1970s, the combination of longlining, trawling, dredging, and other forms of seafood harvesting have decimated marine species populations.
Predatory fish, including tunas, marlin, cod, and sharks, have declined more than 80 percent (here and here) over the past twenty years as a result of overharvest and accidental bycatch. In the Caribbean alone, green turtle populations may have numbered over 90 million three centuries ago compared with 300,000 today.
That’s so staggering I have to repeat it—80% declines. This is some of the most visible evidence of global change on the planet. It’s almost unbelievable.
Because people preferentially remove top predators when harvesting seafood, this leads to what we call a “trophic cascade,” as the abundance of other species lower on the food chain adjust in response to the loss of predators. In cooler, temperate marine ecosystems, the loss of predatory fish and lobsters often causes an increase in sea urchins and gastropod species (e.g., snails). Many of these species are herbivores, grazing on algae. So an increase in their populations leads to a situation of algae overgrazing, sometimes creating what are known as “urchin barrens.” It’s analogous to a deforested area on land, where both habitat and food are lost.
We often don’t think about these connections—how removing tasty fish from the sea can lead to widespread loss in algae, causing ecological systems to collapse.
Over the past decade, marine protected areas (MPAs) have become a popular tool for slowing the decline in marine populations, especially in coastal areas where sensitive habitat (like coral and rocky reefs) and fishing grounds often overlap.
The idea of MPAs is simple: Cordon off an area and eliminate or restrict fishing within the zone. Over time, the populations of species (like fish) increase and animals get bigger. These animals can then disperse out of the protected areas into legal fishing zones where they can be harvested. In an ideal system, it’s a win-win situation—habitats and species are protected and sustainable fishing harvests can be maintained.
There are a few problems, however…
Problem 1: Most of these generalizations are derived from short term studies (< 3 years), that, while useful, may not tell the full story about how marine ecosystems change following protection.
Problem 2: New MPAs may have different histories, from lightly fished to severely depleted, leading to different post-protection legacies (i.e., we may not expect species recovery to be the same). This could skew our interpretation of how successful MPAs are. Enter the social dimension… As nations move to develop MPAs, fishers often co-opt good fishing grounds (ones that are often highly depleted) and leave the marginal, lightly fished areas for MPAs. Does this matter?
In the latest issue1,2 of Ecological Applications, Graham Edgar and colleagues report longer-term changes (up to 16-years) in MPAs located in southern (temperate) Australia. [Side note: Edgar (in Aussie, it's pronounced "aid-gaaah") also wrote one of the best Australian temperate marine taxonomy texts there is. So beautiful it makes a great coffee table book].
What did they find?
Tags: marine protected areas
Posted in biodiversity science, nature and culture, sustainability | 1 Comment »
What are green energy investors waiting for?
Tuesday, November 17th, 2009
If Al Gore and others are correct that we already have available the kinds of renewable energy technology needed to decarbonize the economy, why is it taking so long? As we saw in an earlier post, part of the answer is carbon lock in resulting from our modern political economy.
Another way to examine this problem is to ask what motivates the investment community, particularly venture capitalists. What kinds of policies will entice these folks to plow $ billions into clean energy, and which ones will keep them on the sidelines?
In the current issue1,2 of Energy Policy, Mary Jean Buerer and Rolf Wuestenhagen examine this question by interviewing 60 senior fund managers around the world. They distinguished between policies that incentivized (1) “technology push”—forces like government funded research and development to increase the supply of renewable energy technology and (2) “technology pull”—things that increase the demand for green energy and the ability for businesses to provide it.
What did they find?
Posted in climate economics, energy, solutions, sustainability, technology | No Comments »
Subscribe & Share
Follow on Twitter