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Showing posts with label climate crisis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label climate crisis. Show all posts

Friday, June 28, 2024

Thinking about climate change and international study (Bryan Alexander)

[Editor's Note: This article first appeared at BryanAlexander.org.]

Greetings from London, where I’m attending a CIEE event on international study. It’s good to be back in this city, if only for a few overscheduled days.

I’d like to share notes for my talk here. Since I gave it without slides, the only images I’ll share are screen grabs and photos I took, like this one of the unsuspecting audience:

 

To frame my quick talk, recall my old question: how can higher education best respond to the climate crisis?

I began with a big picture overview: the specter of global warming as a grand civilization crisis. I noted the sheer size and complexity of the problem. It impacts everything, including climate change. I mentioned the many ways colleges and universities can react and be influenced by the crisis, then focused down to the question of international study. How can we reduce the carbon footprint of study abroad? What are the available options? 




I didn’t get to show this Climate Reanalyzer image, but described it.

One option is to consider alternatives to flying. Students can take trains to destinations. This can work well in Europe, coastal China, America’s east coast, and… not many other places, given the limited availability of train infrastructure. We can also turn to ships and boats, but similarly that also only works in a limited sphere. Using these options a study abroad program would have to re-localize or regionalize its scope.

A second option is to go virtual. We already know how to do virtual trips through combinations of web content, live video, and asynchronous video. There have been examples of immersive experiences in virtual reality for a long time. Now extended reality (examples: Hololens, Magic Leap, Vision Pro) offer even greater immersive possibilities. So student can have *some* experience of another part of the world. Yet this runs into all kinds of problems, such as yielding a much narrower and shallower experience, not to mention cost and digital divide challenges.

(I told the crowd a little about my own experience with decarbonizing professional travel)

A third option is for study abroad to embrace climate change at a programmatic level. First, students can study global warming through themed internships, exchanges, formal classes, and just cultural immersion. Host groups can identify climate-relevant opportunities, from civil engineering projects to solar installations, agricultural experiments, and more. Imagine an economics major working with a company attempting to decarbonize operations, or a political science student interning with a government wrangling climate policies. As I keep saying, climate change is deeply transdisciplinary.

Second, students could travel abroad for non-climate topics, but explore global warming in that content. Imagine, for example, a student spending months in Madrid to work on their Spanish language and culture understanding. They can keep an eye out for how climate appears there: consumer behavior, popular attitudes, new regulations, emerging products and services, even the language used. This will take some preparation on the “sending” institution’s part, perhaps through a climate change literacy program.

As with anything involving climate, or higher education, there are quality questions. How can we assure that such experiences are good and germane? How do supporting faculty and staff learning climate issues and their applications in these contexts? Institutions of all kinds – colleges, nonprofits, companies, governments – will have to do this carefully. Realistically, some might not.

I wrapped up this quick sketch with advice to the audience, recommending that everyone in the study abroad world not only get up to speed on climate change, but look ahead to changes in this topic. We might expect (for example) rising governmental or cultural pressure against flying. We should also anticipate developments in air travel technologies, such as the emergence of new jet fuels and the return of airships. Study abroad might take to the skies once more.

…and that was a lot to do in 15 minutes, but I managed in 14. “Like drinking from a firehose” observed the program’s moderator.

Afterwards, there was a good deal of interest from conference participants in conversation. I raised climate during question and answer periods for some other sessions, and presenters took the topic seriously. I got the impression that this was a topic either new to them, or one they hadn’t hashed through out loud. I hope my quick presentation was a useful contribution.

At a meta-level, I’ve been traveling a lot this summer, reaching locations on two continents via car, train, and aircraft. I’ve also done a series of virtual events. I am by no means satisfied with my own professional carbon footprint, and am working on it. 




From yesterday afternoon’s walk.

Tuesday, May 5, 2020

The US Working-Class Depression: "Let's all pretend we couldn't see it coming."

How is the working-class Depression of 2020 similar to the other 47 financial downturns in US history? 

Downturns are frequently precipitated by poor economic and cultural practices and preceded by lots of signals: over-speculation, overuse of resources, oversupplies of goods, and exploitation of labor. What I see are many poor practices brought on by corruption--with overconsumption, climate change, growing inequality, and moral degeneration at the root.

The "disrupters" (21st century robber barons) have enabled an alienating and anomic system that is highly dysfunctional for most of the planet, using "algorithms of oppression." And this cannot be solved with data alchemy, marketing, and other forms of sophistry.

Put down your iPhone for a minute and ponder these rhetorical questions:

Warm Koolaid (2016) signified corporate America's use of myths and distractions to sedate the masses. 

How long have we known about all of this dysfunction? Academics have known about the effects of global climate change and growing US inequality since at least the 1980s. The Panic of 2020 should be a lesson so that we don't have a larger economic, social and environmental collapse in the future.

Who will hear the warnings and do something constructive for our future? Or is this Covid crisis another opportunity for the rich to cash in on the tragedy?

The answer lies, in part, to an ignorance of history and science, and oversupply of low-grade information, poor critical thinking skills, and lots of distractions. That's in addition to the massive greed and ill will by the rich and powerful.

US downturns are baked into this oppressive system. And crises are used to further exploit working families. With climate change and a half century of increasing inequality, these situations are likely to worsen.


Workers will resist and fight oppression; they always do, but will they have a voice as the US faces another self-induced crisis, as trillions are doled out to those who already have trillions?

Here are the dates of the largest economic downturns.
1797-1800
1807–1814
1819–1824
1857–1860
1873–1879 (The Long Depression)
1893–1896 (The Long Depression)
1907–1908
1918–1921 (World War I, Spanish Flu, Panic of 1920-21)
1929–1933 (Stock Market Crash, Great Depression)
1937–1938 (Great Depression)
Feb-Oct 1945
Nov 1948–Oct 1949
July 1953–May 1954
Aug 1957–April 1958
April 1960–Feb 1961
Dec 1969–Nov 1970
Nov. 1973– March 1975
Jan-July 1980
July 1981–Nov 1982
July 1990–March 1991
Mar-Nov 2001
December 2007 – June 2009 (The Great Recession)
March 2020-

We live in an economic system that is unsustainable, unjust, and exploitative. While many of us in academia and the thought industry have known this for decades, those with greater wisdom have known for centuries. Techies and disrupters think it can all be solved with technology, not with profound wisdom. The ultimate in hubris and reductionism. We have to change the system politically, socially, and culturally. We have to be wiser.

How do we do that, radically change society, when our economic system has driven us in the wrong direction for so long? Some of these lessons can be learned from working class history, but they have to be applied with wisdom.