Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Paul B. Hartzog Complexity science shows us not only what to do, but also how to do it: build shared infrastructure, improve information flow, enable rapid innovation, encourage participation, support diversity and citizen empowerment.
Living in a city, it can be hard to relate to where your food comes from, with a majority of produce in supermarkets having limited provenance information. With research suggesting that within a decade the UK will need to import half of its food, the idea of eating locally can seem challenging.
The Red Cross estimates that 14 million people have been affected by flooding in India; over 7 million in Bangladesh and 1.5 million in Nepal. The United Nations puts the total number of people affected by floods and lindslides at total nearly double that at 41 million.
Yes, we should be having the conversation about climate change and Hurricane Harvey, and anyone who tells you otherwise probably has ulterior motives. But before we go there, we need to show the people of the Gulf Coast that we genuinely care about them. Could our shared value be the lives of Texans who are hurting?
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.
In our current political climate, there is little appetite to build and resource huge new bureaucracies. Talent, expertise and the funding already exists within most transportation agencies. We simply have to re-tool the apparatus that was so successful in creating the high-speed network in the 20th Century.
Celebrating the collaborations that transform materials from soil to skin, we set out to visit each designer creating a full look for the Climate Beneficial Fashion Gala. Here we share excerpts from three conversations: read on for inspiration from their design practices and pathways to sustainability, and how each consumer, designer, and the fashion industry as a whole can take part in environmental restoration.
The underlying reason for the uncertainty around talking about climate change is because the fossil fuel industry deliberately obscured this reality from the public for decades, and has a vested interest in limiting knowledge around the damage that their products cause. Muting discussion on climate change as a devastating storm unfolds is a political strategy that serves the interests of those who wish to delay meaningful action on climate change.
Local currencies of the kind described here are more revolutionary than may first appear, not least because they amount to a rejection of the most fundamental neoliberal principles – the primacy of the market and the monetisation of human values.
As the mercury rises, temperatures vary substantially on the basis of proximity to trees or water, the density and nature of built structures, the heat output of air conditioners, and many other factors. Heat mapping is an innovative, data-driven method to visualize temperatures across a geographic area in order to understand why some areas get hotter than others on summer days.
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.
In the midst of the maelstrom named Trump, environmental advocates are finding solace in numerous opinion polls released over the past year or two. From these surveys, it appears one of the few things Americans agree on—more or less– is the reality of climate change and the need to combat it. As a card-carrying curmudgeon, I tend to look at the numbers and see a glass half empty.
