ECOMEDIA IN THE ANTHROPOCENE (THE 2018 ASLE SYMPOSIUM)

A NEARLY CARBON-NEUTRAL CONFERENCE

Panel 18: Gender and Environment

Q & A

Have questions or comments? Feel free to take part in the Q&A!

Before posting, you must first register. Note that questions and comments can be intended for individual speakers, the entire panel, or anyone who has posted to the Q&A. Respond directly to a particular question/comment by way of the little “reply” below it. The vertical threadlike lines are there to make it easier to see which part of the discussion (i.e. “thread”) you are taking up. You can choose to be notified via email (see below) whenever a question, answer, or comment is posted to this particular Q&A. Because the email notification will contain the new comment in its entirety, you can both follow the discussion as it is unfolding, as well as decide whether you would like to step in at any point. You can choose to receive email notifications for as many of the conference Q&A sessions as you like, as well as stop notifications at any time. Because the Q&A sessions will close at the end of the conference, all email notifications will also end at this time. Although only registered conference participants can pose questions and make comments, Q&A sessions are visible to the public and will remain so after the conference has ended, as we hope that they will become cited resources.

ACTIVISTS, ARTISTS, AND ACADEMICS

BUILDING JUST CLIMATE FUTURES TOGETHER

A NEARLY CARBON-NEUTRAL CONFERENCE

Introduction to Nearly Carbon-Neutral (NCN) Conferences

Air Travel: Academia’s Biggest Dirty Little Secret

Ken Hiltner

Air travel to conferences, talks, and meetings can account for a third of the carbon footprint for a typical scholar or university. The event that you are attending is using a nearly carbon-neutral (NCN) conference approach developed at UCSB that can reduce conference carbon footprints by a factor of 100 or more. In this talk, Hiltner details the problem and UCSB’s NCN approach. For more information on how to coordinate NCN events, see our White Paper / Practical Guide.

Ken Hiltner is a Professor of the environmental humanities at UCSB. The Director of the Environmental Humanities Initiative (EHI), Hiltner has appointments in the English and Environmental Studies Departments. He has published five books, including Milton and Ecology, What Else is Pastoral?, Renaissance Ecology, and Ecocriticism: The Essential Reader, as well as a range of environmentally oriented articles. Hiltner has served as Director of UCSB’s Literature & Environment Center, its Early Modern Center, the English Department’s graduate program, and as the Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Visiting Professor in the Environment and Humanities at Princeton University’s Environmental Institute. Prior to becoming a professor, for many years he made his living as a furniture maker. A second-generation woodworker, he received commissions from five continents and had collections featured in major metropolitan galleries.

Q & A

Have questions or comments? Feel free to take part in the Q&A!

Before posting, you must first register. Note that questions and comments can be intended for individual speakers, the entire panel, or anyone who has posted to the Q&A. Respond directly to a particular question/comment by way of the little “reply” below it. The vertical threadlike lines are there to make it easier to see which part of the discussion (i.e. “thread”) you are taking up. You can choose to be notified via email (see below) whenever a question, answer, or comment is posted to this particular Q&A. Because the email notification will contain the new comment in its entirety, you can both follow the discussion as it is unfolding, as well as decide whether you would like to step in at any point. You can choose to receive email notifications for as many of the conference Q&A sessions as you like, as well as stop notifications at any time. Because the Q&A sessions will close at the end of the conference, all email notifications will also end at this time. Although only registered conference participants can pose questions and make comments, Q&A sessions are visible to the public and will remain so after the conference has ended, as we hope that they will become cited resources.

ACTIVISTS, ARTISTS, AND ACADEMICS

BUILDING JUST CLIMATE FUTURES TOGETHER

A NEARLY CARBON-NEUTRAL CONFERENCE

Panel 4: Creating a Field: Climate Justice Studies

Talking about Some of the Most Important Things We Can as Scholar-Activists:  How Can We Create the New Field of Climate Justice Studies?

 John Foran

What might a sociology of climate justice look like?  This talk focuses on two main areas:  a sociology of the crisis itself, and a sociology of all the movements which are seeking to resolve the crisis.

Here are some of its characteristics:

We are in a state of multiple crises –triple crisis involving capitalist globalization, the fraying limits of formal representative democracy, and the pervasive violence that seeps throughout and into our cultures, bound together by, and in turn exacerbating, the likelihood of climate chaos. The interdependency of the several crises means that holistic, relational analysis and visionary transboundary scholarship will be essential to understand and confront climate change, and to create climate justice

Both the depth of the current crisis, and the central role played by the climate disruption that exacerbates it, suggest that our activism around climate change may open a window to moving beyond capitalism in our lifetime.  It seems evident that only a strong and vigorous climate justice movement on a global scale has the capacity to force governments to stand up to the economic and political forces of carbon capitalism.  Movements become even stronger when to a widely felt culture of opposition and resistance they add a positive vision of a better world, an alternative to strive for that could improve or replace what exists. We might call these positive, alternative visions “political cultures of creation.”

In the long run, the only real systemic “solution” to the crisis is a broad yet at the same time more radical climate justice movement willing to confront the root causes of the crisis, including capitalism, and strong enough to decisively cut emissions in a just way.  Our task is to widen and radicalize climate justice movements everywhere we can, preparing the ground in ourselves and a new generation for the longer anti-capitalist project of deep social transformation in the direction of an ecologically sustainable, socially just, and deeply democratic global future.

My academic specialty is movements for radical social change, both 20th century revolutions – my 2005 book Taking Power:  On the Origins of Twentieth Century Revolutions in the Third World is free – and 21st century movements for radical social change, from the Zapatistas and the global justice movement to Occupy, the Arab Spring, and now, esp. the global climate justice movement (see “Beyond Insurgency to Radical Social Change:  The New Situation (2014).

I now work passionately as a scholar-activist on, for, and within the global climate justice movement, which I see as at the center of the struggle for any prospect of achieving social justice and radical social change in the 21st century.  A lot of my work is published at www.resilience.org.  It can also be found on the websites of the International Institute of Climate Action and Theory and the Climate Justice Project.  I am an active member of System Change Not Climate Change, the Green Party of California, and Santa Barbara 350.

Linking Environmental Justice and Climate Justice through Academia and the Prison Industrial Complex

David Pellow

In this chapter, I link the field of Environmental Justice (EJ) studies to the emergent field of Climate Justice (CJ) Studies by examining some links between and among universities, prisons, and EJ/CJ struggles. Because CJ and EJ are tightly interwoven discourses, practices, and visions of social change, I argue that we can illuminate those linkages in practice by connecting the institutions of academia and the prison system to CJ and EJ politics particularly in relation to divestment campaigns, because these institutions are instruments of social oppression and ecological harm. Specifically, I demonstrate that prisons and universities actively contribute to environmental racism and climate change through planning decisions and investments that support fossil fuel economies and place ecosystems and human health at great risk.

David N. Pellow is the Dehlsen Chair and Professor of Environmental Studies and Director of the Global Environmental Justice Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara where he teaches courses on social change movements, environmental justice, human-animal conflicts, sustainability, and social inequality. His teaching and research focus on ecological justice issues in the U.S. and globally. His books include: What is Critical Environmental Justice? (forthcoming); Total Liberation: The Power and Promise of Animal Rights and the Radical Earth Movement; The Slums of Aspen: Immigrants vs. the Environment in America’s Eden (with Lisa Sun-Hee Park); Resisting Global Toxics: Transnational Movements for Environmental Justice; The Silicon Valley of Dreams: Environmental Injustice, Immigrant Workers, and the High-Tech Global Economy (with Lisa Sun-Hee Park); and Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago. He has served on the Boards of Directors for Global Response, The Global Action Research Center, the Center for Urban Transformation, the Santa Clara Center for Occupational Safety and Health, Greenpeace USA, and International Rivers.

For Climate Justice Studies – Focus on the Object — Pedagogical Spectacles of Power Counter-Power —

Richard Widick

Creating the field of Climate Justice Studies will require sustained reflection on what such a discipline should take as its central objects of investigation.  In this talk I argue from theoretical grounds and empirical evidence, derived from years of participatory observation inside the UN climate talks, that one key object of Climate Justice Studies must be the public sphere spectacle of power that is the yearly convocation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Conferences of the Parties.  Power understood dialectically always begets resistance, and so we arrive at the yearly rhythm of power and counter-power putting themselves on display … a pedagogy of masses tuning into the hyper-mediated public struggles that I see reproducing and potentially reshaping both globalization and the unfolding climate crisis.  From our temporal vantage point here, early in the 21st century, I see future decades of perpetual public sphere struggle over global climate policy through the historical lens of the preceding decades of struggle over global economic policy.

Richard Widick, Sociologist & Visiting Scholar at the Orfalea Center for Global & International Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara; Director & Co-founder with John Foran, International Institute of Climate Action & Theory (IICAT); CEO & Founder, Metroglobe Productions (MGP).

Indigenous Climate Change Studies: Indigenizing Futures, Decolonizing the Anthropocene

Kyle Powys White

Indigenous and allied scholars, knowledge keepers, scientists, learners, change-makers, and leaders are creating a field to support Indigenous peoples’ capacities to address anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change. Indigenous studies often reflect the memories and knowledges that arise from Indigenous peoples’ living heritages as societies with stories, lessons, and long histories of having to be well-organized to adapt to seasonal and inter-annual environmental changes. At the same time, our societies have been heavily disrupted by colonialism, capitalism, and industrialization. As a Potawatomi scholar-activist working on issues Indigenous people face with the U.S. settler state, I perceive at least three key themes reflected across the field that suggest distinct approaches to inquiries into climate change — which I will discuss in the brief presentation.

Kyle Whyte holds the Timnick Chair in the Humanities at Michigan State University. He is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Community Sustainability, a faculty member of the Environmental Philosophy & Ethics graduate concentration, and a faculty affiliate of the American Indian & Indigenous Studies and Environmental Science & Policy programs. He is Potawatomi and an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. His research, teaching, training, and activism address moral and political issues concerning climate policy and Indigenous peoples and the ethics of cooperative relationships between Indigenous peoples and climate science organizations. His work has recently extended to cover issues related to Indigenous food sovereignty.

Q & A

Have questions or comments? Feel free to take part in the Q&A!

Before posting, you must first register. Note that questions and comments can be intended for individual speakers, the entire panel, or anyone who has posted to the Q&A. Respond directly to a particular question/comment by way of the little “reply” below it. The vertical threadlike lines are there to make it easier to see which part of the discussion (i.e. “thread”) you are taking up. You can choose to be notified via email (see below) whenever a question, answer, or comment is posted to this particular Q&A. Because the email notification will contain the new comment in its entirety, you can both follow the discussion as it is unfolding, as well as decide whether you would like to step in at any point. You can choose to receive email notifications for as many of the conference Q&A sessions as you like, as well as stop notifications at any time. Because the Q&A sessions will close at the end of the conference, all email notifications will also end at this time. Although only registered conference participants can pose questions and make comments, Q&A sessions are visible to the public and will remain so after the conference has ended, as we hope that they will become cited resources.

ACTIVISTS, ARTISTS, AND ACADEMICS

BUILDING JUST CLIMATE FUTURES TOGETHER

A NEARLY CARBON-NEUTRAL CONFERENCE

Panel 2: The Global Climate Justice Movement in the Age of Crisis, Part Two

Climate justice in the era of Trumpism (and capitalist crisis)

Patrick Bond

View slides.

The transition from apartheid to democracy in South Africa has lessons for those concerned about Donald Trump’s climate politics and progressive responses – in part because Nelson Mandela’s call for sanctions against the Pretoria regime helped to financially destabilise and morally delegitimise the white power structure. That strategy, fuelled by local protests, ultimately split away major corporations from the racist state in 1985, leading to democracy in 1994. Aware of this legacy, Naomi Klein and Joseph Stiglitz (amongst others) have called for sanctions against the United States on grounds of climate irresponsibility. There are a great many reasons to establish a sanctions movement against not only Trump (for he may be impeached in coming years) but also the politics of proto-fascist ‘Trumpism’, for this regime is genuinely a threat to humanity:

accelerated climate change caused by relaxation of environmental regulations

Pentagon’s ‘first-strike’ nuclear capability amidst worsening North Korea and Iran conflicts

extreme military aggression in Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan – including rising Islamaphobia

heightened tension with China

renewed US alliances with authoritarian regimes

trade wars, corporate investment deals, tax dodging and reactionary fiscal policy

macro-economic mismanagement in an era of stagnation yet high volatility

new restrictions to immigration, refugees and development aid

fusions of reactionary socio-cultural, political tendencies in US society with a charismatic state leader backed by most mega-corporate interests

the need for solidarity with US peoples, especially along racial, ethnic, gender and class lines.

To be sure, the July 2017 G20 Hamburg meeting essentially gave Trump a pass. And most importantly, US social movements have not yet asked for sanctions solidarity (although wide-ranging Trump-related micro-boycotts are emerging). But since his rule threatens planetary survival, we are obliged to contemplate what aspects of global capitalist crisis might make Trumpism more vulnerable to global people’s sanctions, as a precursor to the rest of the world lowering our vulnerability levels to environmental, economic and geopolitical catastrophes in the period immediately ahead.

Patrick Bond is professor of political economy at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and honorary professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society which he directed from 2004-16. He is the author of Politics of Climate Justice (UKZN Press, 2012) and he edited several other books on climate policy. His publications mainly document neoliberalism, sub-imperialism and political ecology in South Africa, e.g. Elite Transition (2014), South Africa – The Present as History (with John Saul, 2014), Talk Left, Walk Right (2006), Against Global Apartheid (2003), Unsustainable South Africa (2002) and Cities of Gold, Townships of Coal (2000). His PhD research was conducted at the Johns Hopkins University Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering under David Harvey’s supervision during the early 1990s. Since then he has also taught or researched at Johns Hopkins (public health), York University (politics, environment), California-Berkeley (geography), Gyeongsang University (political economy) and Africa University (development studies).

“The Confluence of Alternatives” – An Indian Initiative

Pallav Das

Contemporary India is going through a perplexingly critical time in its economic development. The neoliberal fundamentalist agenda being foisted on the Indian people by its power elite has inflicted the worst forms of inequality on the society. Today, the richest 1% of the country accounts for nearly half of the country’s total private wealth, about $1.75 trillion! The story of the underprivileged, however, is quite different. Thirty years ago before the country opened up its economy, India accounted for about one-fifth of the world’s poorest. Today, close to one third of that category, or about 400 million, live in India. These economic choices have also had a disastrous impact on India’s environment. Home to six of the ten most polluted cities in the world, its natural resources being plundered rapaciously and its weather patterns becoming increasingly erratic, unreliable and often lethal, the country seems to be hurtling ever forward towards ecological mayhem.

Despite this bleak and overwhelming picture, however, there are significant efforts being made by the civil society to construct alternative paradigms and pathways towards a world that is sustainable, equitable and just. Vikalp Sangam, or the Confluence of Alternatives, is one such initiative, which is trying to explore and understand alternative thinking and organizing on a large spectrum of economic, social and environmental issues in India. The chief aim of the endeavor is to create a platform where alternatives, which take the earth away from ecological self-destruction and the bitter calcification of economic inequality, reach a large audience and become viable for discussion, analysis and eventual replication in other places. This paper will discuss how the Vikalp Sangam vision is unfolding in India.

Pallav Das has pursued a unique twin track career in environmental conservation and creative communications. As a conservation professional and activist, Pallav has spent years exploring the Himalayan wilderness, researching and writing on the ecology of wetlands and alpine areas, building grass-roots networks to promote sustainable environmental policies, and analyzing and advocating public policies for biodiversity and habitat conservation. Pallav’s involvement with environmental campaigns goes back to the late seventies when he co-founded one of the first environmental action groups in India, called Kalpavriksh (www.kalpavriksh.org)

As a communications expert, Pallav has designed and launched innovative campaigns, produced incisive documentaries, developed communications strategies, and founded and led both private and non-profit organizations. Pallav has documented some of India’s most pressing development challenges through his film work, including films on violence against women and the threat of HIV/AIDS among street children. As a student of politics and social anthropology, Pallav is keen to help build a productive space at the confluence of ecology, politics and communications. He is currently in the process of launching a website (www.radicalecologicaldemocracy.org) with Ashish Kothari, his colleague from Kalpavriksh, India. The website is an attempt at providing a platform for exchanging analysis, ideas, activist initiatives and news etc. on next systems and attempts at creating alternatives world wide, which challenge the current neo-liberal orthodoxy.

Militant Particularism and Ecosocialism

Brad Hornick

For Ecosocialists, ecological alternatives are not possible within the framework of capitalism, so the climate movement must articulate socialist demands alongside transitional concrete ecological demands and reforms. The intellectual’s role within movements is both to engage with and empower local militancy, but also maintain theoretical distance in order to direct movements strategically. I discuss recent debates within the ecosocialist community featuring Richard Smith and John Bellamy Foster, using David Harvey’s concept of “militant particularlism” to elaborate the paradoxes of ecosocialist organizing (see attached).

Brad Hornick has been a climate justice activist in Vancouver, Canada and is presently organizing with systemchangenotclimatechange.org. He is a PhD candidate at Simon Fraser University working on a dissertation entitled: “Climate, Capitalism, Existentialism: Observing the Movement.” His discussion piece is entitled “Harvey, Klein, Smith, Foster: Militant Particularism and Ecosocialism,” published in New Politics, Summer 2017.

Climate Justice as Climate Realism

Tom Athanasiou

This video (and sorry if it’s a bit long) presents a draft summary of a book in progress.  In it, I attempt to lay out the basics of what I see as true climate realism.  To wit, this is an argument for a justice-forward strategy aimed at stabilizing the climate system within capitalism.  The argument, to be explicit, is that we haven’t the time to “get past capitalism” before we can stabilize the climate.  This argument, of course, is based on the climate science.

My core claim is that at the highest level, we only need two things to save ourselves.  The first is indeed a thoroughgoing green technology revolution, but the second is a high-cooperation world, and it’s long past time to focus on the second.  And on the unforgiving fact that a high-cooperation world is not and will never be possible at anything like today’s obscene level of economic and social stratification.

Along the way, I try to hit a lot of bases.  One key section – though it doesn’t work that well without slides – attempts to lay out a typology of the climate justice challenges that are now before us.

Tom Athanasiou is a climate-equity specialist.  He founded and coordinated the international Climate Action Network’s Equity Working Group, which was active in the years before Paris.  Currently, he co-directs the Climate Equity Reference Project, a long-term modeling and policy initiative designed to advance equity as a driver of extremely ambitious global climate mobilization, and is also one of the organizers of the Civil Society Equity Coalition, which remains active within the climate negotiations.

Tom’s principle interest is distributional justice, in the context of an emergency global climate mobilization, which he hopes to live to see.  As a writer, he is the author of Divided Planet: the Ecology of Rich and Poor and the co-author of Dead Heat: Global Justice and Global Warming and Greenhouse Development Rights: The Right to Development in a Climate Constrained World.  He is now writing a new book, tentatively titled Fair Enough? Justice and Technology in the Greenhouse Century. 

How the Unist’ot’en are arresting Pipelines and asserting sovereignty

(Please view both the above introduction and documentary film.)

Leah Temper

Since 2011, The Unist’ot’en camp in North-Western British Colombia, Canada, have been maintaining a check-point controlling access through their territory to stop government and industry plans to build several gas and oil pipelines through their territory. These pipelines form part of an energy corridor that aim to unlock the vast energy reserves of the tar sands and transport fracked gas with disastrous implications for the climate. The camp was established to oppose these projects, to defend the sacred headwaters, the salmon that spawn there and to maintain their autonomy over their unceded lands.

In this presentation I will present a video I directed and filmed at the camp in 2013. It shows how against all odds, the Unist’ot’en camp is succeeding in stopping up to 7 pipelines, holding up billions in investment and keeping millions of barrels (and cubic metres) of fossil fuels under the ground. It also shows how the camp, beyond being a simple movement of resistance, is creating a new intentional community, informed by a millennia old relationship with the territory and natural law, but through a constant process of re-imagination.

The Unist’ot’en camp interrupts the flows of capital and goods, however it is also a space for enactment of a living anti-capitalist and post-petroleum alternative, informed by an ancient system of values on how to create sustainable relationships with the material world and  transformative politics of decolonisation that revalue, reconstruct, and redeploy Indigenous cultural practices through a transformative praxis. This includes the recent establishment of a healing center for indigenous youth and experimentation into low-carbon technologies and ways of being.

Welcome to the gateway of meaningful decolonization.

Corridors of Resistance is an EJOLT Video directed by Leah Temper, edited by Siobhan McKeon and Claudia Medina with camera by Fiona Becker and Leah Temper. It accompanies a report on Climate Justice: Refocusing resistance for climate justice. COPing in, COPing out and beyond Paris Including an article on the camp with the title: Decolonising and decarbonising: How the Unist’ot’en are arresting pipelines and asserting autonomy (Leah Temper and Sam Bliss).

Leah Temper is a trans-disciplinary scholar-activist specialized in Environmental Justice Politics, Ecological Economics and Political Ecology based at the Institute of Environmental Sciences and Technology (ICTA) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.  She is the founder and co-director of the Global Atlas of Environmental Justice (www.ejatlas.org) and is currently the principal investigator of ACKnowl-EJ (Activist-academic Co-production of Knowledge for Environmental Justice), a project looking at how transformative alternatives are born from resistance. Previously, she was the Director of USC Canada’s Seeds of Survival Program International, and the scientific coordinator of the EJOLT Project, where she co-edited several reports on Climate Justice and Leaving Oil in the Soil. She has directed and shot several short documentary films about Degrowth, recycler’s movements and climate artivism and resistance.

Q & A

Have questions or comments? Feel free to take part in the Q&A!

Before posting, you must first register. Note that questions and comments can be intended for individual speakers, the entire panel, or anyone who has posted to the Q&A. Respond directly to a particular question/comment by way of the little “reply” below it. The vertical threadlike lines are there to make it easier to see which part of the discussion (i.e. “thread”) you are taking up. You can choose to be notified via email (see below) whenever a question, answer, or comment is posted to this particular Q&A. Because the email notification will contain the new comment in its entirety, you can both follow the discussion as it is unfolding, as well as decide whether you would like to step in at any point. You can choose to receive email notifications for as many of the conference Q&A sessions as you like, as well as stop notifications at any time. Because the Q&A sessions will close at the end of the conference, all email notifications will also end at this time. Although only registered conference participants can pose questions and make comments, Q&A sessions are visible to the public and will remain so after the conference has ended, as we hope that they will become cited resources.

UC-CSU KAN CONFERENCE

A NEARLY CARBON-NEUTRAL CONFERENCE

Panel 4: HUMBOLDT AREA TEAM

Conducting an Environmental Assessment in the Classroom

Sahar Nouredini

Conducting environmental assessments in the classroom can help facilitate discussions about climate change, environmental health and environmental justice.  This presentation reviews 5 online tools that allow teachers to integrate an interactive in-class exercise and discussion of environmental health issues/ policies in their curriculum. All resources shared are very easy to use but have more advanced applications that can be utilized depending on the audience.

“Emergent Strategy and the KAN: A Love Letter to the Network”

Sarah Ray

This presentation will describe the impact of participating in the KAN on my thinking and various aspects of my work – including research, service, teaching, but also the immeasurable and uncategorizable stuff – which I now see as all “frontlines” and “fractals” of change, thanks to our time together.  As a KAN planning team member, I had the privilege of participating in all four workshops, and gained an enormous amount of knowledge about best practices, learned solutions to commonly-shared problems, cultivated “the muscle of radical imagination” with you all, and built relationships and my own network.  The experience emboldened me to more urgently work on projects I suspected were valuable, such as integrating both service learning & community-based education and professionalization into environmental studies curriculum, changing institutional incentives around what “counts” as research in my role as program leader, building courses that serve students’ lives as social change agents, and investing in relationships with my colleagues in other disciplines, units, and institutions.

However, the most valuable lesson for me was what I gained by immersing myself in a book that shaped our workshop process, Emergent Strategy, by Adrienne Maree Brown.  Some of you may remember Abby Reyes discussing the book in her facilitation process. This book has helped me acknowledge the value of all those other efforts, rather than feel burnt out or paralyzed in the face of the scale of the world’s problems and institutional barriers to our goals.  In this presentation, then, I want discuss how this book helped me see the work of the KAN and the work I do in my daily life in radically new ways. From Emergent Strategy, I propose we approach our work in terms of:

– cultivating community and relations (committing ourselves to span an inch wide and a mile deep rather than the other way around)

– valuing conversation over deliverables

– expanding our notion of  what counts as “action,” based on Brown’s nonlinear and iterative view of social change

– shifting toward resilience as a priority over “problem-solving,” in both pedagogy and curriculum development

– increasing appreciation for the theory of the fractal for understanding how change happens and for grasping the power we each all hold

– emphasizing the importance of self-care for ourselves and our students

– shifting curriculum toward affective resilience and emergent strategy as opposed to just content or “marketable skills”

– paying attention to what we want to grow, rather than all the things that are wrong (in life, pedagogy, how we spend our time and attention, in committees and other collaborations, etc.)

– doing work that fuels us.

In what ways might the KAN manifest emergent strategies for the network’s stated goals?  How can principles of emergent strategy help us understand our work, both in and outside the KAN?

The Chico 2030 Project: Climate Forecasting for Everyone

Mark Stemen

For most Californians, the climate issue remains geographically distant, so they can easily dismiss it.  Faculty reinforce this distance in our classrooms when we describe potential climate impacts that are hundreds if not thousands of miles away.  Cal-Adapt has the potential to change that classroom dynamic.  The new climate-modeling tool developed by the California Energy Commission (CEC) now allows anyone to model climate in California by zip code.

My presentation will describe how students in GEOG 506: Community Service in Geography used the Cal-Adapt climate tools to forecast the climate in Chico, CA for the period 2030-2050. Students then met, data in hand, with key staff at the City of Chico to catalog potential impacts to the community and City services. Their findings and all research materials were placed on the web to allow others to continue the project.

The CEC developed Cal-Adapt primarily for use by public planners.  In my class, however, we discovered the tool is also useful in the fields of public health, criminology and creative writing.  Some students used the tool to explore past connections between heat waves and hospital visits and crime rates, while others wrote fictional accounts of the near future using the forecasts available with Cal-Adapt.  This presentation will demonstrate how faculty from across the campus can use Cal-Adapt to improve the teaching of climate change in their classes.

Q & A

Have questions or comments? Feel free to take part in the Q&A!
Before posting, you must first register. Note that questions and comments can be intended for individual speakers, the entire panel, or anyone who has posted to the Q&A. Respond directly to a particular question/comment by way of the little “reply” below it. The vertical threadlike lines are there to make it easier to see which part of the discussion (i.e. “thread”) you are taking up. You can choose to be notified via email (see below) whenever a question, answer, or comment is posted to this particular Q&A. Because the email notification will contain the new comment in its entirety, you can both follow the discussion as it is unfolding, as well as decide whether you would like to step in at any point. You can choose to receive email notifications for as many of the conference Q&A sessions as you like, as well as stop notifications at any time. Because the Q&A sessions will close at the end of the conference, all email notifications will also end at this time. Although only registered conference participants can pose questions and make comments, Q&A sessions are visible to the public and will remain so after the conference has ended, as we hope that they will become cited resources.