Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The company behind the Dakota Access pipeline and many other damaging fossil fuel projects — Energy Transfer Partners — was the focus of nearly 20 actions spanning 10 U.S. states last week. The #StopETP protests, which took place on Friday and Saturday, included a flotilla on a Louisiana bayou, a blockade of pipeline construction equipment in Pennsylvania and a demonstration outside the Texas home of CEO Kelcy Warren.
Because we have burned so much oil and gas and coal, we have put huge clouds of CO2 and methane in the air; because the structure of those molecules traps heat the planet has warmed; because the planet has warmed we can get heavier rainfalls, stronger winds, drier forests and fields. It’s not mysterious, not in any way. It’s not a run of bad luck. It’s not Donald Trump (though he’s obviously not helping). It’s not hellfire sent to punish us. It’s physics.
Unless you are an environmental geographer or a regular reader of The World at 1°C, chances are you apply the term “natural disaster” to events such as Hurricane Harvey, the landslides in Sierra Leone which claimed 1000 lives, or any of the other countless climatic shocks felt over the last month. The fact is that nothing could be more unnatural…
It is currently impossible to guide the evolution of entire societies. Yet this is exactly what humanity needs the ability to do in these turbulent and dangerous times. The litany of threats is well known — global warming, political corruption, conflicts and war, extreme poverty, extremist ideologies, and more — all intensifying in the waves of exponential change that now dominate the patterns of global change in the world.
The programmes that we deliver in the museum, whether they be from schools to life-long learning, to graduate start-up businesses to whatever, how do those empower the makers of the future? And we understand how making makes us feel better. This is a building that was run in the early 18th century off one power source and produced 300 million yards of silk thread, a day, off a water source. And now it’s run off a power station. So it’s to open up that conversation about what is the future of that?
Climate change is not the biggest problem facing the nation; talking about it is. Until we learn to do the one, the other may never be sufficiently solved to stave off the worst of its potential impact. The greatest of these may be a functioning federal government. Actually, talking about anything in today’s partisan charged atmosphere appears to be the problem of paramount prominence. I will focus here only on climate change.
Success is not a matter of wishing, however—if it were, beggars would be kings and I would be handsome and rich. Experience and the findings of attitudinal and behavioral research suggests increasing active voter participation requires a better understanding of how people receive, consider and interpret information.
I regret the lazy oversimplifications of our time. As our world becomes ever fuller withaccessible information, ever more porous, ever more pressing with demands for our attention, so our subtler semiotic capacities appear to stall before the task. Our attempts at interpretation and meaning-making are overwhelmed: more information means less meaning.
A professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College and a former political adviser, Nichols argues that the country has shifted from a healthy skepticism of accepted knowledge to a proud, self-satisfied ignorance and active hostility to the very idea of expertise. Across American society, intellectual authority is resented, resisted and disregarded, with every opinion ostensibly holding equal weight.
We are living in a world where holistic, systemic crises threaten the future of humanity. And yet, there has been an historic pattern of fragmentation in the physical and social sciences needed to tackle them. I have taken on the life mission to guide the evolution of cultural sciences so that they become fully integrated with the dynamics 0f our changing Earth.
The lack of internet access is especially problematic because it is a key driver of inequality, which is a principal threat to not just democracy, but all human rights; hence, the barriers listed above only serve to exacerbate inequality. As the authors of a paper that examined sustainability and participation in the digital commons (Franquesa & Navarro, 2017) emphasized: “it is well established that there is an access gap between citizens who can afford a digital device and an internet connection and those who cannot.
With 16,000 vacant properties in Baltimore—a number some say is severely undercounted and may be closer to the 23,000 that the U.S. Census estimates—there’s plenty of blight to fix. Adding community land trusts into the mix of solutions to throw at the problem seems likely—if not this budget, then next.
