Winter Reflections: Engaging our Children
It wasn’t enough to observe and have a front row seat at issues I felt were important. The students had to care about what they were studying. It had to be relevant to their lives.
environmental messaging
Reordering The Anthropocene
Reaching past narrow definitions of exploitation to consider the other-than-human world allows us to speak of domination more broadly. It opens us up to what nonexploitative, nondominating relationships might require politically, but it also demands alternatives.
No cause is an island
As we wring our hands at inaction on a national food security strategy, climate change or biodiversity protection, it’s easy to focus on the timidity of key decision makers in business and government.
How can we engage and empower people in environmental action?
In recent years a fundamentally new class of technologies – made possible by developments in hardware, software and networking and informed by social psychology – are enabling the emergence of novel forms of feedback on resource consumption and environmental quality.
The Tar Sands and the World Tree – can Ragnarok be avoided?
Norse mythology tells of Ragnarok, a cataclysmic disaster akin to ecocide. In order to avoid this fate we need new stories that reunite human experience with nature.
Desert of the Real
First, I’ll explore the notion that we are living in a ‘desert of the real’. Second, I’ll look at what the desert of the real has meant for environmental communications. And thirdly, to conclude, I will explore alternative ways of knowing and being in the world – and ask what these might mean for design.
The Corrosive Effects of Green Puritanism
During the Economics of Happiness conference in Byron Bay in March this year, I experienced a truly cringe-worthy moment.
The Politics of Time’s Shape
To begin with, it’s important to recognize that no fixed rule sets apart those changes that get called “progress” from the ones that don’t.
Notre-Dame-des-Landes and the risks of activism
Even if it is hardly a priority, I suspect that a significant minority of my readers have heard about the Notre-Dame-des-Landes question. For those who haven’t, I will summarize it. Notre-Dame-des-Landes (Our Lady of the Moors in English) is a rather unremarkable village in the southern Breton countryside, which happens to have been chosen as the location of a future airport. Locals have predictably been upset about that choice and saying that the project has met with some resistance is the mother of all understatements. Things have turned even more messy when Jean-Marc Ayrault, mayor of nearby Nantes, has been appointed as Prime Minister of France with clashes between protesters and the anti-riot police making the headlines of the national papers.
It’s not the economy, it’s the stupid paradigm
Americans’ level of concern for the environment waxes and wanes, depending on how the economy is faring, as illustrated in the 2011 Gallup chart below. The chart shows responses to the question whether the economy or the environment should be given preference asked from 1985 through 2011. Note the trending decline in concern for the environment starting in 2001 with a precipitous drop in 2008 when the economy hit the skids. It’s a truism that our environmental behaviors and our understanding of causes of environmental degradation always lag behind the level of our environmental concern. Why?
The Beehive Collective creates a buzz about the true costs of coal
“This is a tool for shifting the story,” Emily says, taking a step back. Fluttering before us, the banner is the visual manifestation of The True Cost of Coal: Mountaintop Removal and the Fight for our Future, a collaboration that began in 2008 between the Beehive Collective and Appalachian community organizers, activists and residents whose lives have been impacted by mountaintop removal coal mining. “Our job as activists,” she explains, “is not just to give facts, but to make the big, zoomed-out stories in our lives more visible—like the one that says it’s okay to displace Indigenous people and trash the planet in the name of “progress.”