Climate and the Presidential Debate

Climate change was not mentioned in the  first US presidential debate last Wednesday (despite a petition campaign to get it onto Jim Lehrer's agenda).

Bill Becker of the Presidential Climate Action Project reflected on this in an interesting blog post today, and tried to figure out what the candidates might have said if they had been asked (or, at least, what they might have said if they had stayed consistent with their stated policy positions!)

By the way, despite its official-sounding name, the Presidential Climate Action Project is not an agency of the US government.  Its mission is "to develop policy recommendations on climate and energy security, with a focus on what the President of the United States could accomplish using his or her executive authority - in other words, without action by Congress."

Becker begins: "If Mitt Romney and Barack Obama had been able to look through the television cameras at who was watching their first debate, it undoubtedly would have been more interesting than the debate itself."

Read the full post here.

The Adventure Gap

Alpinist - Alpinist.com via kwout

Alpinist #40 arrived in the mail today!  IMHO, Alpinist is the best of the climbing magazines.  It's published only four times a year, so each new issue is an eagerly awaited event.

In this issue is an intriguing article by James Edward Mills, Exploring the Adventure Gap.  (I've linked to the article on the Alpinist web site, but it is behind the paywall at present - it may become free later.)  Mills begins thus:

"In 2006, with little fanfare, Sophia Danenberg reached the top of Mount Everest.  She was one of 493 climbers to summit that season, and her story was not widely reported.  Nonetheless, there was a historical significance: Danenberg was the first African-American to ascend the mountain.  Thus, for the first time, a black climber who was descended from our nation's past of racial oppression had succeeded in elevating herself to the highest point on earth..."

Mills takes Danenberg's achievement as a starting point for a discussion of the "social cues" that us to understand what kinds of behavior are "normal" for persons of differing racial and ethnic backgrounds.  Across the racial spectrum, he reports, Americans view climbing as "one of the things that white people do".  (For example, only 1% of the visitors to Yosemite National Park, the most renowned climbing area in the US, are African-American.)  Similar perceptions apply to other outdoor activities.  Mills names this disconnect "the adventure gap".

Does the adventure gap matter? Mills writes, "In any ecosystem, diversity is a sign of strength.  Any place that can sustain a variety of different individuals with wide-ranging interests and purposes is more likely to thrive...Inclusiveness will be a critical factor in the continuing viability of the environmental movement and in the protection of the landscapes that climbers love."

I'd add that it matters to disengage the narrative of care for and celebration of the earth - including its wild places - from the narrative of privilege and conquest.  Last year, Katie Brown and Alex Honnold (two of the best climbers in the world) made a commercial for Citibank that shows them climbing the extremely photogenic route Ancient Art in the Fisher Towers of Utah.  If you haven't seen it, take a look at the wonderful photography!  But what does it say that the final image  is not that of Brown's elated step onto the corkscrew summit, but of a credit card that promises "unlimited miles on any airline"? 

Mathematics for Sustainability 1

This year, I want to develop a new math course.  Nothing surprising in that - it is what math professors do all the time!   But usually, when we dream of new courses, we are thinking of small classes of eager graduate students to whom we can explain the latest research ideas.   Here, I'm after something a bit different.

The goal will be through a General Education Mathematics course, to enable students to develop the quantitative and qualitative skills needed to reason effectively about environmental and economic sustainability.  That's a lot of long words!   Let me unpack a bit:

• General Education Mathematics At most universities (including PSU), every student, whatever their major, has to take one or two "quantitative" courses - this is called the "general education" requirement.  I want to reach out to students who are not planning to be mathematicians or scientists, students for whom this may be the last math course they ever take. 
• quantitative and qualitative skills I want students to be able to work with numbers ("quantitative") - to be able to get a feeling for scale and size, whether we're talking about gigatonnes of carbon dioxide, kilowatts of domestic power, or picograms of radioisotopes.  But I also want them to get an intuition for the behavior of systems (qualitative), so that the ideas of growth, feedback, oscillation, overshoot and so on become part of their conceptual vocabulary.
• to reason effectively A transition to a more sustainable society won't come about without robust public debate - I want to help students engage effectively in this debate. Shamelessly stealing ideas from Andrew Read's Science in Our World course, I hope to do this by using an online platform for student presentations. Engaging with this process (which includes commenting on other people's presentations as well as devising your own) will count seriously in the grading scheme.
• environmental and economic sustainability I'd like students to get the idea that there are lots of scales on which one can ask the sustainability question - both time scales (how many years is "sustainable") and spatial scales.  We'll think about global-scale questions (carbon dioxide emissions being an obvious example) but we'll try to look at as many examples as possible on a local scale (a single building, the Penn State campus, local agriculture) so that we can engage more directly.  

I have been thinking about this plan for a year or more but now it's time to put it into action.  I've been in touch with my department head and got a green light to offer this for the first time in Spring 2014. In future posts I will share some more about the structure of the course as it develops.  Meanwhile, if anyone has some good suggestions, let me know!

Photo: Warwick University Maths Island in Second Life, by Flickr user wordshore, licensed under Creative Commons.

Dear Mitt

Prosperity without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet: Tim Jackson: Amazon.com: Kindle Store via kwout

Thank you for your letter.  I have to say that it surprised me to learn that I am "one of the Republican Party's most prominent members" (although I suppose you should know).  And I must decline your invitation to "join your team as a major contributor".

In your letter, you describe your "pro-growth agenda" and promise a fundamental shift from "Washington's view of how economic growth and prosperity are achieved".  But both you and your opponent assume that those two things - "economic growth" and "prosperity" - are one and the same.  I wonder whether you are right.

Mitt, you know what it is to make wise use of inherited wealth.  Two hundred and fifty years ago, our civilization came into a vast inheritance - of natural resources like coal, oil, and ores, and of the ingenuity to make use of them.  We've paid for the growth that we have experienced since then - with all the many blessings that it has brought - by treating natural capital as income: by spending down that inheritance at an ever-increasing rate.

That is not wise use: it is not the conservative way.

Perhaps Americans are ready for leadership that acknowledges that Prosperity Without Growth (that is the title of a detailed book by UK government adviser Tim Jackson) is a possible, even perhaps the only possible goal.  Certainly statistics suggest that the growth of the US economy since the 1970s has had very little effect on the nation's self-reported happiness.

In a recent column, Ross Douthat notes this change of mood.  In keeping with the conventional wisdom, he sees it as a Bad Thing ("stagnation", "resignation"), and he suggests that it is an obstacle to your campaign. 

But perhaps you - or perhaps President Obama - may turn out to be the clear-sighted leader who can help us see that the end of growth may not be the end of the world, but the beginning of a new kind of society, as different from our growth-powered industrial age as the industrial age was from the agricultural: less frantic perhaps, but prosperous and happy, and with meaningful work for all.

You want to "restore our country to greatness" (I am quoting your letter again).  But when it was founded, America did not simply restore some Old World ideal of greatness: it defined for the world in a new way what greatness could be.  By showing the way beyond growth, could it do so again? On your watch?

Wanted: a theology of mining (part 3)

Every now and then I look back on he statistics for Points of Inflection.  Consistently, the posts that attract the greatest number of hits are the ones on "Wanted: a theology of mining": part one and part two.   It's not hard to guess why: on the one hand, mining raises a whole cluster of significant theological and ethical questions and, on the other, it seems (at least from my searching) that there has been very little written about this relationship.  I hope that better qualified people than I am will get into this discussion!

Meanwhile, in this post I want to begin laying out some ideas about the methodology for a constructive "theology of mining".

 1. A "theology of mining" is not the same as an "ethics of mining", though it has ethical implications. "Theology of mining", like theology of anything else, should situate mining within the whole Christian narrative of creation, fall, incarnation, and redemption; should correlate the practicalities of mining with the large themes of grace, creation, and restoration.

2. A theology of mining should be attentive to the use of mining language in Scripture.  When such language is used at length, it is often metaphorical.  There seem to me to be two key metaphors:
(a) The search for wisdom is compared to mining, as in Job 28 which I already quoted. According to Crenshaw, wisdom is "the reasoned search for specific ways to ensure personal well-being, to make sense of vexing anomalies, and to transmit this hard-earned knowledge so that successive generations will embody it". To compare this search to mining both reflects an understanding of mining and encourages ecological reflection on the wisdom tradition more generally.
(b) The refining of metals is compared to moral and ceremonial purification, e.g. in Isaiah 48:10, Malachi 3:1-3.

3. However, a theology of mining should not be bound to the specific Scriptural references to mining.  Other theological themes will be relevant and important.  Among these, I'd include the "community of creation" theme (which in various places includes the stones and mountains, i.e. the objects of our mining enterprises, as part of the community that, together with human beings, praises God); the "community across time" theme (we are linked to future generations, and receive form the past); the "sacrifice" theme (related to meat-eating in the OT: after the Flood, animals yield their lives for human food, but they do not thereby become mere objects on which we act... an analogy for mining?)

4. A theology of mining has to be embedded in a larger theological story about what human beings are called to do on this earth and what "sustainability" means in a biblical narrative that has a beginning and a goal.

Photo:  British Columbia Govt Photo, licensed under Creative Commons.   Mining Revenue Sharing Agreement - August 24, 2010 - Forests Minister Pat Ball, front right, and Mining Minister Randy Hawes, second right, with Chief Shane Gottfriedson of the Tk'emlups First Nation, left, at the historic mining revenue-sharing agreement between B.C. and the Stk'emlupsemc of the Secwepemc Nation in Kamloops.

Have we reached the end of economic growth?

That's the title of a piece in the Washington Post this evening.  (link here).  The picture on the left also comes from that piece, with the caption "Only flying cars can save us". 

The article reports on an  analysis by Robert Gordon at the National Bureau of Economic Research, entitled Is US Economic Growth Over?  The article is fascinating as evidence that the possibility of a "steady state" economy is entering mainstream economic analysis.  But don't expect any discussion of the positive benefits that such an economy might provide.  The prospect that Gordon might be right is described in the Post piece as "doom and gloom", "unnerving pessimism", and so on.

But why should this be the case? It is equally plausible to envisage the "end of growth" as a process of maturing, like a teenager entering adulthood; or even as a process of transformative change, like a caterpillar (another voracious consumer) becoming a butterfly. 

It would be a troubled teenager who regarded the news that s/he could not physically grow for ever as "doom and gloom" in any serious sense.

"Sustaining mathematics" - a colloquium

My department runs a weekly "Mathematics Colloquium" - a presentation, usually by a visiting speaker but sometimes by a department member, which introduces and explains some new development in and around mathematics.

This week, for the first colloquium of the new academic year, the colloquium committee invited me as the outgoing department head to share some reflections about what I'd learned since taking up that office in 2007.  I tried to organize my thoughts around the theme of "Sustaining Mathematics", and on sustaining four "ecosystems" each of which is embedded in the next one:

1. Personal intellectual life
2. The culture of mathematics
3. Public support for and understanding of mathematics
4. The global environment

... and under (4), I gave a quick run-through of some basic calculations related to climate change (mostly working from the excellent blog Do The Math, especially this post.)

If you are interested in the presentation, you can find the slides here.

 For my mathematical audience, these calculations were easy to follow.  Nevertheless, it seemed to me that quite a few had not really engaged with this material before, even at this quite modest level.  One of the points I tried to make - I don't know whether I succeeded or not - is that as technical educators we have a responsibility not just to think about these questions for ourselves but also to develop our students' ability to engage with them in an informed way.

I'm interested in hearing about other peoples' efforts to do that.