Thursday, May 21, 2020

Creativity and Climate Change and how we are going to change our course in this course, Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation

This fall we will be completely revamping and updating our Climate Change course at the Patel College of Global Sustainability.  The course was always called and was about "Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation" and we teach at Patel that part of the challenge for humanity is and always has been adapting to changing environments.  What has been slow to adapt, relative to the accelerated pace of the anthropogenic changes to our atmosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere, has been the education system that is supposed to help us address the environmental, social and economic  problems those changes have caused.

That is why we at the Patel have decided with our students and with experts and community leaders that we must change the climate of our course on climate change, that we must change course concerning how we run our course.

And we need your help.  We need your creativity.  We obviously  can't "stay the course" in this course; remember Einstein's famous definition of INSANITY:  "Yup, Einstein once said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result."  So while we don't want the climate to change we need our schooling to change.

A student who had taken our "Envisioning Sustainbility" class last semester, recently commented, "That class was focused on creativity so I am interested to see how to bring that element into these more "strict" science topics behind climate change."

And there is the challenge:  How do we put creativity in the service of good science when we have been misled for so many years to think there was a separation between the arts and the sciences that can not easily be crossed? 

In one of the seminal texts we use for the Envisioning Sustainability course, called "The Origins of Creativity" Harvard's Emeritus Professor of Evolutionary Biology, my former teacher E.O. Wilson, makes a impassioned case for ending the division, saying that,

"“Like the sunlight and the firelight that guided our birth, we need a unified humanities and science to construct a full and honest picture of what we truly are and what we can become... Science owns the warrant to explore everything deemed factual and possible, but the humanities, borne aloft by both fact and fantasy, have the power of everything not only possible but also conceivable...“To express this increasingly complex subject as succinctly as possible, the ancestors of our species developed the brain power to connect with other minds and to conceive unlimited time, distance, and potential outcomes. This infinite reach of imagination, put quite simply, is what made us great.”

To make this course great so that it can be truly useful in the face of the great challenges of our times, we need to harness your brain power through connection with the other minds in and outside our class and use that infinite reach of your imagination to make connections and come up with solutions that are at once factual, possible and conceivable even when they seem to others outlandish.  For the imagination takes us into those outlands and brings what seemed foreign home where it can become part of the familiar.

This is a major theme of our new Climate Concentration -- bringing climate solutions -- ways of mitigating and adapting to climate change HOME.  And there isn't time to waste.  For most Americans, privileged in a cocoon of wealth and power, climate change effects did seem "outlandish" -- they were things that were happening "out there" in foreign lands plagued by poverty and unfortunate geography.  But now the changes we in the industrialized nations spewed out across the globe through our emissions have come home to roost.  Floods and fires and heat waves and deadly cold snaps, droughts  and intense storms are all now impacting the U.S. and other hypertrophically wealthy regions with catastrophic results.  And these dramatic changes should be enough to galvanize us into action...

Unless, that is..  the education system itself doesn't undergo dramatic changes that can help us lick this problem in time.  For we ARE running out of time -- and for many people who have died or suffered or have lost property and jobs and seen their environments degrade and livelihoods collapse, the climate change clock has already hit midnight.

It is because  of the urgency of this situation and its imminent and accelerating and expanding effects that we cannot afford to wait to change our educational system, starting with this very course, which is all about Climate Mitigation and Adaptation.  How absurd would it be if we kept doing "business as usual" knowing that the way we did things in the past are precisely the practices that lead to climate catastrophe? It doesn't take an Einstein to understand "Problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them." ... um, even if Einstein himself is the one who said that.  Well, more accurately, Einstein said, in the context of averting a nuclear disaster, "“a new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels.”.  But whether we are discussing nuclear war or climate change, the point is the same -- we need a new kind of thinking, an new consciousness, and to get there we need a new kind of education system.

In short, we need imagination and the courage to combine creativity and scientific rigor to combat climate change.

So how do we do it?

Well, first off, we aren't going to be spending much if ANY time debating the reality of climate change.  It really is a waste of time UNLESS you really want to develop your debating skills so you can take on your climate skeptic uncle over the dinner table  at Thanksgiving.  That's on you, and you are quite welcome to use some of your time in this course working out the arguments and improving your rhetoric. I'll give you credit for it too.  But I personally won't be that interested in what you come up with.   My focus in this course is on climate change action, since the science has all been settled (most of it for decades if not centuries).  We'll keep the material in the course if you are still uncertain, but I personally am not invested in doing any "proving" that climate change is real and dangerous and mostly under human control.

What I will be focussing on this semester is HOW to combat climate change, how to mitigate its effects -- the ones that are still under our control -- and how to best adapt to the changes we can no longer control. And I will be focusing mostly on the personal dimension, on the home scale and community and regional scales, rather than the global scale.  Climate change is a global issue, but it was created by local actions -- what each of us did at the gas pump, on the way to work, at work, and at home.  We were the consumers who created the market for the producers in industry to sell us things that caused and are causing the greenhouse effect.  We were warned about it for over a hundred years.  But very few of us felt able to fight the tide.  Far too few of us made any real change in our lifestyles and practices.  Now we MUST truly "be the change".

To do that, in this class,  we have decided to use the Drawdown Project as our seminal text and material.  Drawdown asks us to move as fast as possible toward the implementation of the 100 top carbon drawdown/climate mitigation strategies and technologies already vetted by and agreed to by teams of top scientists and policy makers who have spent those decades debating the impacts of anthropogenic climate change inducing actions.

But what does that mean "to USE the Drawdown project?" Does it mean to read it? To memorize the words and concepts and principles contained within it? To take quizzes on it? To write essays about it?

Well, sure if you want to.  But it seems to me that we've all been doing something just like that all these years with all the course material we are assigned, and we have tons of experts and reams of publications.  If you want to be one of those esteemed publishing experts on climate change science and policy, we applaud you and support you.  But it won't be enough. Not hardly.  We live in a world where despite the ever growing number of academic and lay specialists on the problem, the problem is growing even faster.  Did you think because you are aware of renewable and alternative energy sources our net use of fossil fuels has been going down?  Not at all -- only the proportion of energy coming from non fossil sources is going up, which is a good thing,  while overall energy use, and the "population bomb"  continue their inexorable exponential rise. And those are bad things that outweigh all the gains on the good side. Deforestation, coral bleaching and habitat degradation are at an all time high and the species extinction rate is higher than ever before in geologic history.
And you thought learning these facts and getting A's on exams and applause for your essays on the deep S-H-I-T we are in was going to change that?

Of course you didn't.  But we played the game -- some of you were going to graduate with a Masters and go on to save the world by, oh, I dunno, urging companies to "go green" and "divest from fossil energy". Others were going to become famous by making gloomy documentaries about how those companies were after all just greenwashing and telling us we are screwed anyway, like the recent Michael Moore documentary, Planet of the Humans, while others of you would become academics and hope to make  highly paid keynote speeches that get you tenure and  make you career safe and allow  you to hire some company to put solar shingles and a Tesla battery on your garage to power your emission-free sports car.  A few of you were going to invent a new product, some technological marvel that would make you rich and the planet better off -- people, profit, planet, always in that order right?

And MOST of you were going to simply graduate and get busy with life and go back to business as usual. a business as usual that will keep the others in business for a while before collapse comes -- and the perverse logic of capitalism and socialism and communism will make it so that the more sustainability consultants and experts we produce at Patel, the more problems we will need to have -- after all, our Mastery of Sustainability won't count for much if everybody is doing things sustainably, right? Who would hire you once the crisis is over?  So we need most of you to pull for the status quo it seems.

You know the story, so I don't need to wear my cynicism on my sleeve, right? Especially since I'm NOT a cynic.

The way I see it, it is a good thing that climate change is anthropogenic.  Because if we caused it, if we changed the climate in a bad direction then WE can change it back.  That's a good thing.  Imagine if we were fighting space aliens trying to terraform the earth, like Charlie Sheen in that Sci Fi classic "The Arrival".  Now that would be bad.  Or imagine it is caused by sunspots or cosmic cycles.  Then we would have nothing to fight.  I feel bad for the people who will alive when the sun expands and swallows up the earth, as it inevitably will. Them's hard times.

What we have here IS  fortunately manageable, as your new primary text, Drawdown, shows us.  We just have to drawdown the carbon. The CO2 and CH4 and  chlorofluorocarbons... oh and the nitrous oxides too.  And yes, we have to keep them  down, once we stop spewing green house gases in the air, which means letting nature do its Gaian repair and self-regulating thing -- plants and algae are particularly important.  But you learned that in the third grade, right? So what are we doing in graduate school?

Business, as usual, says we gain mastery by saying simple things in ever more complex ways, mastering more Greek and Latin and German terminology, and developing a more sophisticated way of presenting our ideas.  We are also supposed to become clearer thinkers, ever more skeptical and able to discern between "truth" and "falsehood".  And so you could graduate into our tribe of scientific thinkers knowing that YOU have truth and justice on your side and hang out with us on our side of the Titanic, the richer and ever-rising side, watching with dismay as those on the other "side" , the lower side, slip underwater, still refusing to acknowledge how their support of a bad shipbuilding industry and lax safety standards led to the collision with the iceberg.  At least you knew better even if you couldn't turn the ship around in time...

But it doesn't have to be this way.  You COULD --- I'm not saying you will -- but you COULD use this semester to get the lifeboats ready and help as many people off the ship as possible. I don't mean to use the semester arguing with the crew or the other passengers.  I mean spending your time building resilient lifeboats and life vests and lifebuoys and testing them on YOURSELF first and proving their effectiveness and one by one reaching out and helping others get on board.  I mean doing this from a point of conviction because you yourself have LIFE-TESTED the Life Boat or Life Buoy.  I mean you yourself have tried a Drawdown solution or improved or implemented a Drawdown solution and then SHARED YOUR EXPERIENCE.

That is what is going to get the other passengers to stop fiddling on the deck and get to work building their own.  So THAT is the emphasis of this course, as far as I'm concerned. 
But since you are a passenger on this rapidly sinking spaceship earth you get to have a say.
I can't and won't FORCE YOU to put your theories and ideas into practice -- I'll still give you traditional credit for traditional work -- for learning the "facts" and faithfully regurgitating them, for doing your research and writing position papers and making policy recommendations and saying "ain't it awful" and sneering at climate skeptics. I am not the sort of person to play dictator and hope for a happier outcome.  The idea that all we need is a stronger leader and stronger laws is appealing but at the same time appalling.  Dictators can dictate rapid change but they set up and perpetuate a system where they ultimately make lots of people unhappy and usually at some point get overthrown by yet another dictator who simply undoes everything the previous dictator does. Such is the nature of political rivalry.

In this course I'm asking us to move past that -- to investigate and implement and report on solutions that transcend rivalry and obviate it.  Among the 100 solutions compiled in Drawdown there are plenty that are win win win in most situations.  You can find ones that are fairly easy to put into practice and which won't threaten or offend anyone.  And there are even more solutions that YOU can work on in your life and community that didn't make it in the book because their MACROeconomic impact wasn't considered as high as the ones they chose to fit in the format of a readable book.  And yet, we each live in our own MICROeconomic bubble where the equations for impact and efficiency and economy are different.  So find solutions YOU believe to be a win-win for your that give you the most bang for the buck, and OWN them.  Make them a part of YOUR PERSONA here at Patel College so that people turn to YOU for advice and expertise when they consider "being the change" themselves.

So that is the first thing -- you being the change and documenting and reporting on it.
In my courses I consider each of us to be "scouts" who explore and then come home with things we can try.  That is your first order of business in this class as it is being reconceived.
It is a course about CLIMATE ACTION.

The second thing is to turn the scarcity model for climate action, where you are part of a "special" cadre of visionaries and do-gooders and caped crusaders, into the "social proof" model, where taking climate improvement action is just one of those everyday, normal, common sense things we all do, like brushing our teeth and washing our hair.  And the way to do that beyond living it, is to advertise it broadly and simply, the same way they do in the soap commercials, so that "if you tell two friends and they tell two friends and they tell two friends", as the advert goes, we will all be using the climate action equivalent of Clairol Herbal Essence Shampoo.

We need YOU to create snappy, compelling one to two or three-minute vignettes on each of the drawdown solutions you are involved in and are exploring so that others don't have to read Drawdown or take our course.  You have to be the amplifying and broadening public voice of the Drawdown solutions.  As we say in my courses "we're the folks that do the reading and studying and experimenting so that YOU don't have to!".  The you in this case are all the people NOT in our course.  They need to be able to rely on us to get the drawdown message in a way that doesn't interfere with their busy lives.  You cleared this time to go to school and become a master of sustainability, so we depend on you.  Everyone else has a full plate.  And if they don't, well, it is OUR responsibility to help them put the right food on that plate.  So we need recruitment videos and advertisements and public relations material, made by YOU.

Third thing:  We who are in the good fight already have our plates so full with activism and engagement and advertising and creation and sharing and living and striving to be the nexus that WE NEED HELP.  And this is the only valid place for what you think of as "assignments".  You should feel free to be creative, use your imagination and implement or  come up with your OWN "life-tested" climate solutions and find your own best way to communicate them.  But there is also a critical need for people to help those of us on the front lines of changing climate change do OUR JOBS. 

As your professor I already have so many potentially impactful projects that I can hardly breathe and I certainly can't get them all done.  If you trust me to have done all the traditional schooling and come to the right conclusions, and you are past the point of your own climate skepticism and indecision and self-defeating participation in the status quo, but you would like some direction as to where to apply your energies then I strongly advise that you jump on one of my projects (or projects of Dr. Brooke Hanson or Joseph Dorsey, as we are working together on this and overlap). You can earn almost all your "credit" by doing this so-called "work for hire" if you like, freeing you of the burden of primary creativity and allowing your imagination and creative juices to flourish in the structure of our well defined project goals.

For example -- at the Rosebud Continuum Sustainability Eco-Science Center where I live, we desperately need people to create well conceived educational signage about each of the Drawdown solutions we are putting in place on the property so the schoolkids and community members who come can go on self-guided tours (especially in the age of physical distancing due to the pandemic!).
We need people who can design the signs and create the files in Instructables Easel Software and then run the X-carve CNC robotic routing machine we have to actually make them. Then we need them mounted.
We also need people to design content for the Zappar Augmented Reality codes that the USF Office of Innovative Education has given us an expensive license to use so that each sign can trigger a video, an animation, 3D content, audio or weblinks and additional information. That way people can walk around the property and point their mobile phones or tablets at the signs or exhibits and watch them come to life, augmented by great content.
And then we need people to CREATE THAT GREAT CONTENT.  We need those snappy Life Tested Drawdown solution promotional videos and 3D content and web content so that we can link it to the Zappar codes on those signs.

That could easily take you the entire semester and would be a great way to collaborate with each other and learn the drawdown solutions in a meaningful and enduring way. You would be earning points for working as a "climate solution action production team" -- 1st by researching, selecting and  life testing drawdown solutions on your own, 2nd by creating content that communicates your findings to a wider audience, and 3rd by creating signage and augmented reality material that links that material to real geographical social and environmental spaces of "social proof"  where audiences can see the solutions in action.

So that is what I propose for the re-design of this course.  We start with the solutions most relevant to YOURS and MY habits and locations of interest.  That means starting wth Rosebud.  And when we finish with Rosebud, we need the same sort of content for Fat Beet Farm and for all the other locations -- schools, classrooms, meaningful sites around the community -- where we can reach people about how to halt climate change. It will take years and we have less than a decade. 
And of course any other ideas you have for accelerating and multiplying the force and impact of our drawdown work are welcome and will be credited.  But this is a start that fills  a need.
Won't you join me?









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