“The plight of the Maldives poses an eschatological question as much as an environmental one. When will the world end? How can we prepare for it? In that respect, we are all Maldivians.
The islanders just happen to be among the first groups to contemplate these questions seriously. But that’s not to say each and every Maldivian spends his or her day preoccupied with sea levels. Ahmed Abbas, one of Nasheed’s longtime friends and the political cartoonist for the magazine Sangu, told me that Nasheed was overreacting. “We have been here for 3,000 years,” Abbas said as we drank espressos and ate ice cream one afternoon at a cafe in Malé. “Coral is our base. If one millimeter of water comes up, then one millimeter of coral goes up, too. So don’t worry.” His response was downright flippant when the conversation turned to a looming exodus: “Why don’t we all just board a barge? Anni” — Nasheed’s nickname — “can be the captain!” Nonetheless, Abbas was flying the next day to Sri Lanka, where he said he hoped to scout a tract of hillside property for himself.”
If American higher education is to thrive in the 21st century, colleges and universities, like Wall Street and Detroit, must be rigorously regulated and completely restructured. The long process to make higher learning more agile, adaptive and imaginative can begin with six major steps:
1. Restructure the curriculum, beginning with graduate programs and proceeding as quickly as possible to undergraduate programs. The division-of-labor model of separate departments is obsolete and must be replaced with a curriculum structured like a web or complex adaptive network. Responsible teaching and scholarship must become cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural.
Just a few weeks ago, I attended a meeting of political scientists who had gathered to discuss why international relations theory had never considered the role of religion in society. Given the state of the world today, this is a significant oversight. There can be no adequate understanding of the most important issues we face when disciplines are cloistered from one another and operate on their own premises.
It would be far more effective to bring together people working on questions of religion, politics, history, economics, anthropology, sociology, literature, art, religion and philosophy to engage in comparative analysis of common problems. As the curriculum is restructured, fields of inquiry and methods of investigation will be transformed.
2. Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education, and create problem-focused programs. These constantly evolving programs would have sunset clauses, and every seven years each one should be evaluated and either abolished, continued or significantly changed. It is possible to imagine a broad range of topics around which such zones of inquiry could be organized: Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life and Water.
Consider, for example, a Water program. In the coming decades, water will become a more pressing problem than oil, and the quantity, quality and distribution of water will pose significant scientific, technological and ecological difficulties as well as serious political and economic challenges. These vexing practical problems cannot be adequately addressed without also considering important philosophical, religious and ethical issues. After all, beliefs shape practices as much as practices shape beliefs.
A Water program would bring together people in the humanities, arts, social and natural sciences with representatives from professional schools like medicine, law, business, engineering, social work, theology and architecture. Through the intersection of multiple perspectives and approaches, new theoretical insights will develop and unexpected practical solutions will emerge.
3. Increase collaboration among institutions. All institutions do not need to do all things and technology makes it possible for schools to form partnerships to share students and faculty. Institutions will be able to expand while contracting. Let one college have a strong department in French, for example, and the other a strong department in German; through teleconferencing and the Internet both subjects can be taught at both places with half the staff. With these tools, I have already team-taught semester-long seminars in real time at the Universities of Helsinki and Melbourne.
4. Transform the traditional dissertation. In the arts and humanities, where looming cutbacks will be most devastating, there is no longer a market for books modeled on the medieval dissertation, with more footnotes than text. As financial pressures on university presses continue to mount, publication of dissertations, and with it scholarly certification, is almost impossible. (The average university press print run of a dissertation that has been converted into a book is less than 500, and sales are usually considerably lower.) For many years, I have taught undergraduate courses in which students do not write traditional papers but develop analytic treatments in formats from hypertext and Web sites to films and video games. Graduate students should likewise be encouraged to produce “theses” in alternative formats.
5. Expand the range of professional options for graduate students. Most graduate students will never hold the kind of job for which they are being trained. It is, therefore, necessary to help them prepare for work in fields other than higher education. The exposure to new approaches and different cultures and the consideration of real-life issues will prepare students for jobs at businesses and nonprofit organizations. Moreover, the knowledge and skills they will cultivate in the new universities will enable them to adapt to a constantly changing world.
6. Impose mandatory retirement and abolish tenure. Initially intended to protect academic freedom, tenure has resulted in institutions with little turnover and professors impervious to change. After all, once tenure has been granted, there is no leverage to encourage a professor to continue to develop professionally or to require him or her to assume responsibilities like administration and student advising. Tenure should be replaced with seven-year contracts, which, like the programs in which faculty teach, can be terminated or renewed. This policy would enable colleges and universities to reward researchers, scholars and teachers who continue to evolve and remain productive while also making room for young people with new ideas and skills.
For many years, I have told students, “Do not do what I do; rather, take whatever I have to offer and do with it what I could never imagine doing and then come back and tell me about it.” My hope is that colleges and universities will be shaken out of their complacency and will open academia to a future we cannot conceive.”
“In the tactile world, we use our five senses to take in information about our environment and respond to it, Maes explained. But a lot of the information that helps us understand and respond to the world doesn’t come from these senses. Instead, it comes from computers and the internet. Maes’ goal is to harness computers to feed us information in an organic fashion, like our existing senses.”
Jacques Cousteau’s daughter talks about eco-travel, environmental education, and more on Indagare.
An interview excerpt that stuck out to me:
What would you advise parents who want to educate their children about environmental issues during their travels?
First of all, I don’t understand why environmentalism isn’t part of every curriculum in schools. You teach biology, so why not make that connection for the kids? In terms of travel planning, I would really pay attention to where you choose to go and teach the kids why you decided to bring them to a particular place: because they compost, because they have solar panels, because they have educational eco programs, etc. The consumer demand has to be the driving force for places to go green.
Even before Obama was president-elect, probably as soon as he secured the democratic nomination for President of the United States, I began thinking about how I would attend his inauguration. For me, Obama winning the election was more than just getting rid of Bush or buying into hype, it was the first time I had volunteered my time and energy into politics and caught a glimpse of how democracy could work when enough people are invested.
The night of November 4th I watched the election votes come in at my friends Gregory, Michael and Jenny’s house. That night we celebrated and decided to journey together to the inauguration. As the days dragged on between November 4th and January 20th we reserved a zipcar, Jenny made housing arrangements with a friend of hers who lives in D.C., and we all applied for tickets through our new york representatives and senators. Only Michael ‘won’ a ticket but we were all going to go anyway.
We decided to leave Sunday, January 18th and come back Wednesday the 21st. We didn’t actually leave until early afternoon on Sunday but it turned out to be a traffic free and music filled road trip. Driving down I-95 towards D.C we saw numerous Obama bumper stickered cars and trucks. We even exchanged waves and smiles with passing Obama supporters. Somewhere in Delaware, or maybe Maryland?, we stopped to refuel at a rest stop full of Obama buttoned people using the restrooms and buying coffee. We talked with a few ladies about our Shepard Fairey Obama decals littered on the back and sides of our ‘vehicle for change’ (a silver scion).
We arrived in the D.C. neighborhood of Trinidad about 6:00 p.m. where we were to stay with Jenny’s, and soon to be our, friend Kelly. Kelly has a beautiful two story townhouse with an amazing coffee maker. She works for the Washington Post and had a few anecdotes for us about the inauguration coverage frenzy. I am so thankful she let us stay with her.
Sunday night we settled in, met her neighbors, and went out for drinks and food at Sticky Rice. We enjoyed Sticky Rice, it is a pan-Asian bar with an upstairs restaurant. The crowd was a little hipster, a little local, but all excited. We sat at the bar for a while waiting for the table and I wrestled tator-tots out of a bucket with chopsticks and nursed my jameson and soda. When we finally sat upstairs I ordered the dirty vegan- a tofu, peanut sauce, noodle extravaganza- and Jenny talked to our waiter about his nike rip-off black t-shirt printed with “just doin’ it and doin’ it and doin’ it well”.
Monday morning we slept in. I read the actual paper version of the New York Times and Washington Post on a warm fuzzy couch and had coffee with my cold leftover noodles.
On Monday afternoon Michael left earlier than us to take the 10 minute bus ride in to Union Station and pick up his silver ticket on the capitol grounds.
Monday afternoon, an hour or so after Michael left, Gregory, Jenny, Kelly and I drove to Union Station, parked a block away, and walked towards Independence Avenue. I stopped at a street vendor and bought a black, MLK inspired Obama t-shirt for a friend before we decided to wait in a hot cider and croissant-filled coffee shop for Michael. Michael said he stood in the ticket line for a while but he and others basked in the pleasantly present sun despite the freezing temperature. Once in the government building where he picked up his ticket, Michael said he was able to roam around and no one seemed to be watching or giving directions.Once we all met up in the cafe we decided to walk towards the west front of the capitol, then down the mall passing the Washington Monument and all the way down to the Lincoln Memorial. As we started on our way it was slightly after 5:30 and the sun had set. Many people, although not crowded, were wondering around the streets in capitol hill. We stood on the south west corner of the capitol with hundreds of others. We took pictures of the news crews and inauguration organizers setting up equipment, adjusting camera angles, and patrolling the area.
We soon met up with a few other friends who had come from New York and elsewhere and we then walked further west down the mall.
Walking down the national mall was a strange mix between a carnival and a political event of a new millennium.Vendors sold hand clappers with Obama’s face stuck on, Obama themed condoms, neon bracelets, horribly designed yellow sweatshirts, endless amounts of buttons, hand warmers and whatever else one might want to buy. A few times I paused on the mall and turned ’round to observe the visual spectacle i was in; The capitol in its iconic glory, lights bathing me like a football field and the Egyptian monument ramming up from the ground. As we passed between 3rd street and 4th street we saw a large, frenzied crowd drawn to the msnbc lights like bugs. Everyone was screaming and waving at the camera hoping to be on one of the most popular cable news shows of the day. We watched David Shuster talk in a glass enclosed studio and hoped to see Keith Olbermann’s head. We watched a nearby screen with the live msnbc coverage of the exact place we were standing; I experienced an eery mirror effect. Since no Keith was to be found (sorry Jenny) we walked further down the mall. After a quick pit stop in the port-a-potties and a failed encounter to buy hand warmers we approached the Washington Monument. Around the Washington Monument were tall police surveillance apple pickers; the same ones you can find in the rough parts of my Brooklyn neighborhood. Close to the Washington Monument were dramatic crisscrossing light beams but I’m not sure what they were meant to do or signify. I should also mention that as we are walking down the mall we pass a dozen or so ‘jumbotrons’ set up for the morning proceedings. Some of these jumbotrons were on and projecting an amazingly bright 56th inauguration logo or msnbc coverage.
We crossed 15th street and slightly paused to take in the tall, narrow obelisk. Michael and I were in the midst of a discussion about the possibility of lost evidence buried deep within this planet telling of us advanced ancestral civilizations. We wondered whether a million years from now our surviving artifacts would tell people that a man of middle-eastern descent, who led a great empire, was celebrated with the construction of a middle-eastern inspired structure. In a million years it may be difficult to understand the difference between 2009 and 1884, the year the Washington Monument was completed.
As we walked around the monument and alongside the physically, although not symbolically, frozen reflecting pool we saw a group of people pulling police barricades out of the frozen water. These people were not workers as I first assumed, just regular citizens concerned that the inauguration barricades should be set back in order.
Reaching the end of the reflecting pool we walked as close as we could get to the Lincoln Memorial. Workers were taking down the stage and barricades from the celebrity infused concert the day before. Many tourists waited in line to enter the memorial but we just walked on. My knees and face were fairly frozen by this point. We paused at a bronze Vietnam veterans statue titled “The Three Soldiers” and then walked out of the mall.
We walked quite a ways to 20th street and Pennsylvania avenue. Here we waited for a table in an impressive restaurant, Founding Farmers. Founding Farmers is housed in a certified green building, is owned by a collective of American family farmers and claims to serve local, organic fare. I opted for the grilled cheese (Gruyere and cheddar!) and tomato soup. It was perfect for such a cold night. After dinner we took an unnecessarily long cab ride with a driver who assumed we didn’t know where we were. However, on the ride home I talked to my roommate who miraculously acquired a ticket for me in the extremely close blue section. I couldn’t believe it.
When we finally arrived home Monday night we were exhausted but excited. I had to get up the earliest out of everyone because I was to meet my roommate, her boyfriend and his D.C. friend Barbara at the blue gate entrance at 8:30.
Tuesday morning. January 20, 2009. The 56th Presidential Inauguration. Soon to be President Barack Hussein Obama.
I woke up at 6:45, threw on layers of clothes, stuffed everything in my pockets and carried a small blanket to the bus. I rode by myself to what I thought would be Union Station with mostly local residents. The bus driver stopped at N. Capitol and H street and announced that this was the closest to the perimeter he was allowed. I didn’t realize at the time that I was close to Union Station and was a little confused about where to go. I could see the capitol building and the thousands of other people walking in front of me so I just followed and hoped for the best. As I approached the west front of the capitol I realized this was going to be a hectic day. There were no posted maps, no designated helpers, simple if any signage, and plenty of people. What was most amazing to me is how everyone was exiting their various buses and public transport areas and were converging on a single point, the purple gate, but were still in many fairly organized lines. Once I talked to a nice gentleman who shared his map with me I realized I had to walk to the exact opposite side of the capitol, the blue entrance. Along my route two military trucks passed by towing the cannons I assume were used for the 21-gun salute. I saw a lot of important looking older people exiting their homes and joining the sidewalk crowd.
After about 30 minutes I approached the sign for the blue gate.
I thought this would be the end of my struggle to get in BUT I was in for a surprise. At Washington and C the crowds were beyond capacity. It was now 8:15 and a line snaked out from the blue gate but quickly lost shape or purpose. People immediately around me said they had stood in line from 7:00 and I later saw these same people unable to get in at noon. These were all people with tickets to the blue section! This same mess happened in the purple section and it is not clear to me (or most others) why or how this happened. My phone, text function and email capabilities were mostly jammed from 8:30 to 1:30 but I was able to sparingly communicate with my roommate. I was afraid I would never find my roommate or get in to my section so I considered abandoning my plans to meet my roommate and instead walk down to the 18th street mall entrance for non ticket holders. I knew if I did this I could get in to the mall but I would be alone in a crowd of millions. I climbed up on a concrete barrier to look out over the lost crowd and weigh my options. Two citizens, a young caucasian man and woman, were on the barrier yelling out information to people. They took the initiative to help so many people and were greatly needed. No police were available. No information was available.
At this point I had decided to leave the area I was in and walk down the mall. But at this same moment my roommate, Georgia, was able to reach me via phone. We finally found each other, quite miraculously I might say, in the part of the crowd overlooking the infamous tunnel of doom. At this point it was 10:00 or so and I was tired, frustrated and disheartened. We tried to find a line to stand in but it was too muddled. People were everywhere and no one knew what to do or where to go. Amazingly, people were in general good spirits and asking each other from where they had traveled. I talked to several Brooklynites and one Hawaiian.
After abandoning the line we walked toward the Botanic Garden. We climbed on a metal gate perched on the raised steps of a building on 2nd street SW. That worked well for a few minutes until a police officer asked us to get down. There were several people across the street in trees, so apparently a tree is a more acceptable perch than a gate. We finally rested on the steps by the Botanic Garden and could see and hear the stage. I stood on a lamppost. At this point it was about 11:30. I was sad that I was not with Michael, Jenny and Gregory. I was happy I was with Georgia.
I was sad I did not feel the rush of the mall crowd but glad I was not packed to the point I could not see. But as Bush and other leaders took the stage, as Aretha Franklin sang, as the presidential music began I realized this was a moment to cherish and remember.
The crowd around me cheered and booed at the culturally appropriate times. When Obama finished the oath, joy spread through each person like the flu. I admit I cried. I cried not specifically because of Obama himself but because I had made it to this physical point, with my good friend Georgia, in a democracy I could be proud of, on a day when millions gathered in D.C. not to protest but to celebrate.
As soon as the cheering ceased I wiped my eyes and jumped off my lamppost because everyone around me had suddenly huddled together in bands of 8 to 12 people. Obama addressed the world during those next 18 or so minutes and everyone had found others who had radios, blackberries, iphones, regular cell phones, and battery powered TVs. There were at least a dozen of these impromptu huddles around me and everyone was silently listening to both Obama yards away and a delayed but clearer voice through their shared device. This moment was a tangible convergence of politics, community, technology and humanity; one I’ll never forget.
This is an article I want to pass on to my students:
“Neuroscientists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky received a 2002 Nobel Prize for their 1979 research that argued humans rarely make rational decisions. Since then, this has become conventional wisdom among cognition researchers
Contrary to Kahnneman and Tversky’s research, Alex Pouget, associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester, has shown that people do indeed make optimal decisions—but only when their unconscious brain makes the choice.
“A lot of the early work in this field was on conscious decision making, but most of the decisions you make aren’t based on conscious reasoning,” says Pouget. “You don’t consciously decide to stop at a red light or steer around an obstacle in the road. Once we started looking at the decisions our brains make without our knowledge, we found that they almost always reach the right decision, given the information they had to work with.”
Pouget says that Kahneman’s approach was to tell a subject that there was a certain percent chance that one of two choices in a test was “right.” This meant a person had to consciously compute the percentages to get a right answer—something few people could do accurately.
Pouget has been demonstrating for years that certain aspects of human cognition are carried out with surprising accuracy. He has employed what he describes as a very simple unconscious-decision test. A series of dots appears on a computer screen, most of which are moving in random directions. A controlled number of these dots are purposely moving uniformly in the same direction, and the test subject simply has to say whether he believes those dots are moving to the left or right. The longer the subject watches the dots, the more evidence he accumulates and the more sure he becomes of the dots’ motion.
Subjects in this test performed exactly as if their brains were subconsciously gathering information before reaching a confidence threshold, which was then reported to the conscious mind as a definite, sure answer. The subjects, however, were never aware of the complex computations going on, instead they simply “realized” suddenly that the dots were moving in one direction or another. The characteristics of the underlying computation fit with Pouget’s extensive earlier work that suggested the human brain is wired naturally to perform calculations of this kind.
“We’ve been developing and strengthening this hypothesis for years—how the brain represents probability distributions,” says Pouget. “We knew the results of this kind of test fit perfectly with our ideas, but we had to devise a way to see the neurons in action. We wanted to see if, in fact, humans are really good decision makers after all, just not quite so good at doing it consciously. Kahneman explicitly told his subjects what the chances were, but we let people’s unconscious mind work it out. It’s weird, but people rarely make optimal decisions when they are told the percentages up front.”
Pouget analyzed the data from a test performed in the laboratory of Michael Shadlen, a professor of physiology and biophysics at the University of Washington. Shadlen’s team watched the activity of a pair of neurons that normally respond to the sight of things moving to the left or right. For instance, when the test consisted of a few dots moving to the right within the jumble of other random dots, the neuron coding for “rightward movement” would occasionally fire. As the test continued, the neuron would fire more and more frequently until it reached a certain threshold, triggering a flurry of activity in the brain and a response from the subject of “rightward.”
Pouget says a probabilistic decision-making system like this has several advantages. The most important is that it allows us to reach a reasonable decision in a reasonable amount of time. If we had to wait until we’re 99 percent sure before we make a decision, Pouget says, then we would waste time accumulating data unnecessarily. If we only required a 51 percent certainty, then we might reach a decision before enough data has been collected.
Another main advantage is that when we finally reach a decision, we have a sense of how certain we are of it—say, 60 percent or 90 percent—depending on where the triggering threshold has been set. Pouget is now investigating how the brain sets this threshold for each decision, since it does not appear to have the same threshold for each kind of question it encounters.”
It’s already well blogged, this vertical farming idea, and its currently the 8th most emailed article on the NYTimes.
Vertical farming is currently only conceptual and is the work of a Columbia professor, Dickson Despommier (of the apple trees) and his grad students. It begins with a skyscraper used to raise food such as fruit, vegetables, fish, and livestock using greenhouse growing methods and recycled resources year-round. Vertical farms would encourage eating locally, using less petro-based energy, and reduce the need for large scale horizontal farmland.
Vertical farming caught my interest today because I noticed that the idea has been around for almost 10 years but is just now swimming in the zeitgeist. Most comments about the idea are positive even while recognizing it will take plenty of money and planning to appear. It was rumored earlier this year that Vegas was building a vertical farm but it seems that such plans are non-existent.
The vertical farm is just one example of how people are beginning to see the connections between our urban space and our needs as living organisms. The vertical farm professor, Despommier, also writes about medical ecology, the idea that our health is linked to the physical and natural environment around us. It’s not a crazy idea, and is a given in environmental psychology or urban public health studies. Despommier must be on the same track as environmental psychologists if he is making these connections between architecture, health and innovative thinking for our future.
This “auto-sufficient amphibious” city will mostly likely end up being some kind of eco-resort for the rich long before it becomes a refuge for the displaced. But oh I wish I could live on it now.
Each city-pad can sustain 50,000 inhabitants and includes plans for self-sustainable resources, zero or no co2 emissions, and obviously the pleasure of living in such a place.
Huffington Post thinks such a city will be far in the future but the idea of a planned, man- made island has already been done in Dubai. If you combine Dubai’s islands with an oil rig platform, it seems that pad-city is soon to come.
Last Autumn I was wondering how or if my interest in anti-war protesting is related to my interest in why environmental activists become, well, active. Somewhere along this trail of inquiry I ran into the theory of Peace Parks.
Wikipedia states that peace parks create friendly borders between countries and encourage natural animal migration patterns, tourism, and economic development. However, my reading of peace parks, particularly of Ali Saleem, argues that a peace park can be used to decrease conflict between countries because of the sustainable, clean air and water it provides. Countries who are competing for resources or arguing over social-religious-political differences can benefit from peace parks when both sides begin to understand their equal need for quality natural resources like clean air and water. The argument for peace parks is that this understanding of shared need can be extended in the minds of opposing leaders and citizens to an understanding of a shared struggle to survive as a species.
Although peace parks sound like a noble idea, and one I wanted to investigate more, I was skeptical about the possibility of its success. But, two recent events have curved my skepticism.
First, at the 2008 Association of American Geographers conference I attended a paper session from a West Point professor titled “Climate Change and Potential Effects on Future U.S. Military Operations”. The WP professor, Eugene Palka, states “Although its primary mission is to fight and win the nation’s wars, the U.S. Military also must be postured to deploy anywhere in the world (to include regions where climate change contributes to deteriorating environmental conditions and escalating violence or threatens national interests) to undertake operations as directed by our government.” During his session I was surprised that this West Point professor, along with his colleagues in the panel, had many progressive and honest ideas about the future role of our government in natural environment resource conflicts. I was reminded then about peace parks and the possible role they could play.
The second event that allowed me to see the possibility of integrating peace parks into a plausible plan is an article I read today titled ” Global Warming could increase Terrorism“. This past Wednesday the chairman of the National Intelligence Council told Congress that global warming could destabilize “struggling and poor” countries around the world, prompting mass migrations and creating breeding grounds for terrorists. Another committee chairman, Ed Markey, argues
“Human beings all over the planet face death or damage or injury if we do not act”.
So it seems that peace park proponents, military analysts, and congressional chairmen are all on the same page but not likely to come up with a solid or possible plan. This would make for an interesting city planning project or research initiative but I’m not sure what the next step would be. A good first step for me, in order to further this argument, is to read more about what peace parks exist and get my hands on that classified congressional report.
If you have an ideas and opinions please share in the comments.
An interview excerpt that stuck out to me:
Once in the government building where he picked up his ticket, Michael said he was able to roam around and no one seemed to be watching or giving directions.Once we all met up in the cafe we decided to walk towards the west front of the capitol, then down the mall passing the 
Everyone was screaming and waving at the camera hoping to be on one of the most popular cable news shows of the day. We watched David Shuster talk in a glass enclosed studio and hoped to see Keith Olbermann’s head. We watched a nearby screen with the live msnbc coverage of the exact place we were standing; I experienced an eery mirror effect. Since no Keith was to be found (sorry Jenny) we walked further down the mall. After a quick pit stop in the port-a-potties and a failed encounter to buy hand warmers we approached the Washington Monument. Around the Washington Monument were tall police surveillance apple pickers; the same ones you can find in the rough parts of my Brooklyn neighborhood. Close to the Washington Monument were dramatic
