Archive for February, 2010
| Newer Entries »Rifkin: The Empathetic Civilization
Wednesday, 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
Posted in nature and culture | No Comments »
Global change is causing forests to grow more
Wednesday, 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 rely on things like tree rings to measure growth rate. This also means you have to contend with natural regeneration cycle of individual trees. Young trees often grow fast, and growth slows as the trees get older. If you cut down a tree and look at a cross section of tree rings, you can often see wide rings fading to narrow 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 these aging trends 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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Posted in climate change science | 2 Comments »
Is a post-Copenhagen roadmap emerging?
Monday, 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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Tags: Copenhagen
Posted in climate economics, conflict, energy, policy, risk analysis, solutions | 1 Comment »
Why do people vary so much in their environmental attitudes?
Monday, 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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Posted in behavior | 1 Comment »
Is There an Ecological Unconscious?
Monday, 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.
Posted in behavior | No Comments »
Trees: Another way to increase global methane?
Monday, 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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Tags: trees and forests
Posted in climate change science | 1 Comment »
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