Careers, Environment•
on January 5th, 2010•
What if we turned the challenge of creating our sustainable future into a global race? Imagine the green careers that would bloom. This idea was originally proffered by Thomas Friedman, one of my favorite thinkers and author of Hot, Flat and Crowded.
“I am an Earth Race guy. I believe that averting catastrophic climate change is a huge scale issue. The only engine big enough to impact Mother Nature is Father Greed: the Market. Only a market, shaped by regulations and incentives to stimulate massive innovation in clean, emission-free power sources can make a dent in global warming. And no market can do that better than America’s.
Therefore, the goal of Earth Racers is to focus on getting the U.S. Senate to pass an energy bill, with a long-term price on carbon that will really stimulate America to become the world leader in clean-tech. If we lead by example, more people will follow us by emulation than by compulsion of some U.N. treaty.”
The Space Race Took Us to the Moon. Where Could the Earth Race Take Us?
“In the cold war, we had the space race: who could be the first to put a man on the moon. Only two countries competed, and there could be only one winner. Today, we need the Earth Race: who can be the first to invent the most clean technologies so men and women can live safely here on Earth. Maybe the best thing President Obama could have done here in Copenhagen was to make clear that America intends to win that race. All he needed to do in his speech was to look China’s prime minister in the eye and say: “I am going to get our Senate to pass an energy bill with a price on carbon so we can clean your clock in clean-tech. This is my moon shot. Game on.”
Because once we get America racing China, China racing Europe, Europe racing Japan, Japan racing Brazil, we can quickly move down the innovation-manufacturing curve and shrink the cost of electric cars, batteries, solar and wind so these are no longer luxury products for the wealthy nations but commodity items the third world can use and even produce.
If you start the conversation with “climate” you might get half of America to sign up for action. If you start the conversation with giving birth to a “whole new industry” — one that will make us more energy independent, prosperous, secure, innovative, respected and able to out-green China in the next great global industry — you get the country. For good reason: Even if the world never warms another degree, population is projected to rise from 6.7 billion to 9 billion between now and 2050, and more and more of those people will want to live like Americans. In this world, demand for clean power and energy efficient cars and buildings will go through the roof.”
* Imagine the Green Careers.
An Earth Race led by America — built on markets, economic competition, national self-interest and strategic advantage — is a more self-sustaining way to reduce carbon emissions. Let the Earth Race begin.
Ecology/Environment
Urban gardeners, Carbon footprint analysts, Solar panel installers, Wind energy construction, Coastal relocation specialists, Water conservationists
Economy/Employment
Emissions traders, Global impact advisors, Green marketing executives, Green job program creators and trainers, Consumption reduction consultants, Environmental literacy specialists, Hemp producers, Sustainability auditors
Education
Personalized education advisors, Online school employees, Environmental literature professors, Environmental historians
Enlightenment
Storytellers, Sleep therapists, Change therapists, Interfaith leadership roles, Interfaith mediators, Retirement counselors, Play therapists
Equality/Equity
Health care advisors, Peacemakers, Foreign culture specialists, Restorative justice practitioners, Community-builders, Migration counselors, specialists
Written by Todd Borghesani
* Dr. Robert Pavlik, a leader in Sustainable Futures Education at the Marquette University’s Institute for the Transformation of Learning, sent me this list of future green careers.
I know what you are thinking. A farmer? Is this really a great career move? In a word, yes. I’m not talking about moving to Indiana and driving a tractor for the rest of your life, though. I’m talking about becoming an elite urban farmer, creating a technology and science driven enterprise that uses run-down urban properties and advanced hydroponic systems. Then add a Ph.D. in botany — the scientific study of plants, including their physiology, structure, genetics, ecology, distribution, classification, and economic importance. I’m talking about creating a future-proof career, a sustainable future and a great business.
Urban farming is farming in an urban setting. Why would anyone do such a thing? Simply put, urban farming alleviates many of the problems caused by conventional agriculture. Food produced today is less nutritious, has more chemicals and is genetically altered for shelf life – not taste or nutrition. Would you like some Dichlorodiphenyl-trichloroethane (DDT) in your salad? Neither would we. A distinct advantage of urban farms is that they give you control over a city’s food supply. Urban farms have the freedom to grow heirloom varieties that greatly surpass store-bought produce in both taste and nutrition.
The population of the entire Baltimore-Washington Metroplex as of 2007 is 8,241,912. If each person comsumes an average of two lbs of food per day, and no food is produced within the city, then over 16 million pounds of food must be trucked or flown into our region each and every day. The amount of carbon emissions associated with this are staggering. Billions of tons of carbon emissions are emitted during the production and transportation of food. The average vegetable travels 1,434 miles before reaching our plates. With urban farming, food is produced where it will be consumed, greatly reducing the embodied carbon footprint of vegetable produce.
Internet, People•
on December 28th, 2009•
This generation of high school and college students — The Gamer Generation — stands to have the greatest impact on our society. At more than 90 million people, the “gamer generation” is already bigger than the baby boom.
They are already aware of the extraordinary problems of 21st century: feeding a growing population with a limited amount of arable land; the green revolution and alternative energy, managing the impacts of global warming and greater energy demands; and the spread of health threats that respect no national borders.
Today’s students have not just changed incrementally from those of the past, nor simply changed their slang, clothes, body adornments, or styles, as has happened between generations previously. A really big discontinuity has taken place. It is the arrival and rapid dissemination of digital technology in the last decades of the 20th century.
They have spent their entire lives surrounded by and using computers, video games, digital music players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the digital age. Today’s average college grads have spent less than 5,000 hours of their lives reading, Playing video games (not to mention 20,000 hours watching TV). Computer games, email, the Internet, cell phones and instant messaging are integral parts of their lives.
The gamer generation will dominate the workforce and they are already changing the rules of business. All the hours immersed in game culture have created masses of employees with unique attributes: bold but measured risk taking, amazing ability to multitask, and unexpected leadership skills: 21st century skills that employers want.
The Gamer Generation innately understands the nature of online life.
The philosopher Gilles Deleuze is a spring chicken in the history of philosophy, living and working from 1925 to 1995. Yet his influence has surged in the last 20 years, vying today with the most prominent philosophers of the 20th and 21st centuries. He established a different definition of “virtual” that speaks to games and online experience in particular.
The virtual is opposed not to the real but to the actual. The virtual is fully real in so far as it is virtual.
Exactly what Proust said of states of resonance must be said of the virtual: “Real without being actual, ideal without being abstract”; and symbolic without being fictional. Indeed, the virtual must be defined as strictly a part of the object – as though the object had one part of itself in the virtual into which it plunged as though into an objective dimension.” – Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition
Deleuze opposed essentialism, that is, the notion that existences, such as human beings, could be distilled into a single common identity. Instead, he saw existence in terms of multiplicity in all its forms – that, for instance, we as human beings are not single selves but multiple selves spread out in time, that life itself exists in a continuum and state of alchemical flow and information exchange.
What we think of as “virtual” is in fact very real and important, accessed on a parallel dimension rife with meaning.
He lifts the virtual up above the “actual,” or the material manifestation of what we observe in metaspace. Deleuze’s virtual is neither intrinsically inferior nor superior to the material, but it is on an incomparably different plane of existence. This is a concept that would resonate with many World of Warcraft players. When we explore worlds online and connect with other players across vast physical distances, we do not become less real. Arguably, for those who have experienced this life, we feel more real – our physical masks pulled down, revealing the structure of ideas, passions and contemplations beneath.
Next time you start to castigate your son or daughter for spending so much time friending on Facebook, playing games, and socializing in Second Life, think about their play as pioneering work.
Excerpted, in part, from Erin Hoffman’s feature article, “Ditching The V-Word,” in Escapist.
Soon, you may be able to find information about almost any physical object with the click of a smartphone. Imagine working on augmented reality applications that change that way we use our intelligence; that augment our intelligence. Careers in this area include human computer interaction, computer science, computer vision and biomemetics.
This vision, once the stuff of science fiction, took a significant step forward this month when Google unveiled a smartphone application called Goggles. It allows users to search the Web, not by typing or by speaking keywords, but by snapping an image with a cellphone and feeding it into Google’s search engine.
How tall is that mountain on the horizon? Snap and get the answer. Who is the artist behind this painting? Snap and find out. What about that stadium in front of you? Snap and see a schedule of future games there.
Goggles, in essence, offers the promise to bridge the gap between the physical world and the Web.
Goggles is not the first application to try to create a link between the physical and virtual worlds via cellphones. A variety of so-called augmented-reality applications like World Surfer and Wikitude allow you to point your cellphone or its camera and find information about landmarks, restaurants and shops in front of you. Yet those applications typically rely on location data, matching information from maps with a cellphone’s GPS and compass data. Another class of applications reads bar codes to link objects or businesses with online information about them.
Goggles also uses location information to help identify objects, but its ability to recognize millions of images opens up new possibilities. “This is a big step forward in terms of making it work in all these different kinds of situations,” said Jason Hong, a professor at the Human Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.
When you snap a picture with Goggles, Google spends a few seconds analyzing the image, then sends it up to its vast “cloud” of computers and tries to match it against an index of more than a billion images. Google’s data centers distribute the image-matching problem among hundreds or even thousands of computers to return an answer quickly.
It’s not hard to imagine a slew of commercial applications for this technology. You could compare prices of a product online, learn how to operate that old water heater whose manual you have lost or find out about the environmental record of a certain brand of tuna. But Goggles and similar products could also tell the history of a building, help travelers get around in a foreign country or even help blind people navigate their surroundings.
It is also easy to think of scarier possibilities down the line. Google’s goal to recognize every image, of course, includes identifying people. Computer scientists say that it is much harder to identify faces than objects, but with the technology and computing power improving rapidly, improved facial recognition may not be far off.
Mr. Gundotra says that Google already has some facial-recognition capabilities, but that it has decided to turn them off in Goggles until privacy issues can be resolved. “We want to move with great discretion and thoughtfulness,” he said.
Find the original article posted on the NY Times
It takes a very unique team to bring a visionary’s imagination to life. Cameron, who has served as an adviser to NASA to investigate a camera for a Mars mission, is known for taking the science in his flicks very seriously. So how did he do?
Here we check on some of the movie’s scientific bona fides with top researchers in their respective fields to see where artistic license and scientific plausibility meld. As fantasy and reality are melded in CG worlds, the entertainment sector offers opportunities for computer scientists, artists, engineers, designers and scientists across all disciplines.
Technologies of Avatar: Amplified Mobility Platform
For work, combat and stomping through Pandora’s rainforest, humans gear up in Amplified Mobility Platform (AMP) suits. These armored exoskeletal vehicles are very similar to the Armored Personnel Units featured in The Matrix Revolutions and the power loader in Cameron’s own Aliens, but with an enclosed cockpit.
From this perch in the machine, the movements of a human operator’s arms and legs are translated to the suit’s exterior limbs and “amplified.” The operator swings his arm several inches, and the AMP’s corresponding giant metal arm scythes a 10-foot arc.
“The super hydraulics are all very strong so [the AMP suit] can crush buildings and do all the things that, like, a tank could do,” says Avatar vehicle designer Ty Ruben Ellingson in a promotional video. The Herculean strength granted to the AMP suit’s operator lets space marines tote giant 30-mm autocannons into battle as easily as one might carry a rifle. In further characterizing the AMP suit, John Rosengrant, design supervisor for Stan Winston Studios, says it’s “an Apache helicopter with legs.”
The Science: For decades, the U.S. military has been looking into powered exoskeleton suits that could let soldiers lug around heavy equipment—as well as bigger guns—while aiding in rescue work, construction and injury rehabilitation.
The Army’s research and development branch, DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) issued various grants since 2000 under its Exoskeletons for Human Performance Augmentation program, including funding for the Raytheon Sarcos team. Their machine, called XOS, weighs 150 pounds and fits around the wearer’s arms, legs and back.
This aluminum robot’s hydraulics allow the wearer to lift 200 pounds hundreds of times without tiring, yet the XOS suit remains nimble enough to allow the man-cum-machine to climb stairs or kick a soccer ball. The key hurdle for the Raytheon Sarcos device is independently powering it. For now, the XOS remains tethered to an external power source.
The World of Avatar: Alpha Centauri
The white-yellow glow of Alpha Centauri A, a star very similar to our Sun, illuminates the giant gaseous planet Polyphemus and its tropical moon Pandora. On this lush world, great beasts roam the jungles and pterodactyl-like creatures soar through the sky. A sentient, blue-skinned humanoid species known as the Na’vi has evolved here and learned to live in harmony with nature.
The Science: Alpha Centauri A is one of the three stars that make up Alpha Centauri, which is located 4.37 light years away, making it our solar system’s closest stellar neighbor. This proximity has inspired an intense hunt to reveal the exoplanets that could be right next door.
Last January, a team led by Yale astronomer Barbara Fischer began a five-year survey of Alpha Centauri using a 1.5-meter telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in Chile. Her group is looking for rhythmic, telltale patterns in the wavelengths of a star’s light caused by the gravitational tugging of orbiting worlds.
This “wobble technique” has already ruled out the presence of Jupiter- or Saturn-scale exoplanets (like Polyphemus) around the Alpha Centauri stars. But “there’s a very good chance,” Fischer says, that planets with masses near that of Earth’s could grace this star system. “There’s still so much we don’t understand about planet formation around single stars,” Fischer says—let alone triple-star systems like Alpha Centauri. So in terms of what may be out there, “it’s almost an open slate.”
The orbital mechanics of the two stars at Alpha Centauri’s heart, often called Cen A and Cen B, indicate where planets are likely to reside. The stellar duo gravitationally tangos as close as 11 astronomical units (AUs, the average distance from the Sun to Earth) to each other before swinging as far apart as 36 AU. (The third star, a red dwarf called Proxima Centauri, circles this couple at a considerable distance and is too faint for Fischer’s team to study, but it could boast small planets, too.)
Given this setup, the orbits of exoplanets that formed 2 AU away and more from Cen A and Cen B would get destabilized by the other star and eventually get shot right out of the system, Fischer says.
Fortunately, if life has taken root in the Alpha Centauri system, it is not likely to suffer this fate. The habitable Goldilocks zone—the not-too-hot, not-too-cold orbital band where water can be liquid on a planet or a moon’s surface—is situated closer to both Cen A and Cen B. The former, a bit bigger than the Sun, has a Goldilocks zone of around 1.2 AUs out.
From Cen B, at about 90 percent of the Sun’s mass, this zone is found at about 0.75 AU. Since both stars are chemically similar to the Sun, the same general mixture of elements that allowed life to develop on Earth should have been available in the primordial soups of both Cen A and Cen B’s planetary brood.
For now, the jury is still out on whether the Alpha Centauri system has smaller, Earth-like worlds in life-friendly regions, but Fischer expects answers shortly. “By the end of year four [2012], we’ll really know,” she says. Meanwhile, other efforts led by famed planet-hunter Michel Mayor of the University of Geneva and a new initiative by the University of Canterbury in the United Kingdom may render the verdict even sooner.
For more on the science facts and science fiction in Avatar, read the full story on Popular Mechanics.
Environment•
on December 8th, 2009•
COPENHAGEN — Despite recent fluctuations in global temperature year to year, which fueled claims of global cooling, a sustained global warming trend shows no signs of ending, according to new analysis by the World Meteorological Organization made public on Tuesday.
The decade of the 2000s is very likely the warmest decade in the modern record, dating back 150 years, according to a provisional summary of climate conditions near the end of 2009, the organization said
The period from 2000 through 2009 has been “warmer than the 1990s, which were warmer than the 1980s and so on,” said Michel Jarraud, the secretary general of the international weather agency, speaking at a news conference at the climate talks in Copenhagen.
The international assessment largely meshes with an interim analysis by the National Climatic Data Center and NASA in the United States, both of which independently estimate global and regional temperature and other weather trends.
Mr. Jarraud also said that 2009, with some uncertainty because several weeks remain, appears to be the fifth warmest year on record.
Read more of this story »
Science•
on December 8th, 2009•
Greenhouse gas-sucking rubber ducks could be in the future. Myriant Technologies LLC has just won U.S. Department of Energy funding of up to $50 million to construct a new plant that will produce Succinic Acid from sorghum, using a biobased process that is more energy efficient than conventional methods, and also absorbs more carbon dioxide than it produces.
Until now, petroleum has been the feedstock of choice to manufacture Succinic Acid. If commercially successful, a more sustainable biobased process like Myriant’s could have a significant impact on global greenhouse gas emissions, because Succinic Acid is used in a fantastic variety of materials from non-toxic diesel fuel additives, pharmaceuticals and food to plastic car parts, computer casings, and shoe soles.
by Tina Casey
Environment•
on December 4th, 2009•
When the arctic winds howl and angry waves pummel the shore of this Inupiat Eskimo village, Shelton and Clara Kokeok fear that their house, already at the edge of the Earth, finally may plunge into the gray sea below.
“The land is going away,” said Shelton Kokeok, 65, whose home is on the tip of a bluff that’s been melting in part because of climate change. “I think it’s going to vanish one of these days.”
Coastal erosion has been an issue for decades here, but rising global temperatures have started to thaw the permafrost that once helped anchor this village in place. Sea ice that protects Shishmaref’s coast from erosion melts earlier in the spring and forms later in the fall. As a result, the increasingly mushy and exposed soil along Shishmaref’s shore is falling into the water in snowmobile-sized chunks.
The crumbling land already toppled one house into the sea. Thirteen other homes — nearly all of the Kokeoks’ neighbors — had to be moved inland. The land they stood on washed away.
Now the Kokeoks’ wooden residence, which Shelton built by hand 20 years ago, stands alone — only feet from the edge of this barrier island.
By John D. Sutter
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Environment•
on December 4th, 2009•
There has been a colossal change in India’s climate change strategy over the last few months. From being a staunch opponent of any emission reduction targets to a prospective climate leader, India has changed gears so rapidly that now its proposals to reduce its carbon footprint have come under questioning.
India opposed emission reductions in all its forms, voluntary or mandatory, from the very beginning. At all the meetings prior to the Copenhagen Climate meet the Indian climate negotiators, along with others from developing countries, virtually battled with their counterparts from United States and Europe. India always opposed emission cuts claiming that its per capita emissions are among the lowest in the world. India continued to negotiate with this fact as its central argument.
But all this changed when indicated that it had agreed to reduce its carbon emissions following almost year long talks with American officials. China signed agreements with the United States to enhance trade in areas like energy efficiency, renewable energy investments and green buildings. And recently, China announced its target of 15 percent energy from renewable sources by 2020 and reducing carbon intensity by 40-45 percent by 2020.
by MRIDUL CHADHA
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Environment•
on December 3rd, 2009•
Classroom Earth, a program of The National Environmental Education Foundation, defines environmental education as the process, activities and experiences—across disciplines—that lead students to have a greater understanding of how the earth’s resources and natural systems work and interact with each other and with human-made systems.
As awareness about environmental issues evolves and become more sophisticated, students move towards environmental literacy. Ultimately, environmental education, as it develops environmental literacy, helps foster an understanding of how everyday decisions, lifestyle choices, and activities impact the finite resources of this planet.
Environmental Education in the Classroom and Beyond
Environmental education can be taught in formal settings (schools or other traditional academic institutions) or in non-formal experiences. In addition, environmental education can and should be an integral part of every discipline. Classroom Earth can help you incorporate environmental learning into whatever subject area you teach, visit our Resource Library.
Environmental Education Guidelines
Sifting through the many environmental education resources available can be daunting. Determining the quality of materials can be even more overwhelming.
The North American Association for Environmental Education (NAAEE) has developed Guidelines for Excellence that recommend that all materials and activities have:
- Fair and accurate information describing environmental problems, issues, and conditions, and in reflecting the diversity of perspectives on them;
- Material about the natural and built environments, ecological concepts, and attitudes and values are presented in sufficient depth;
- An emphasis on skill building including: creative and critical thinking;
- An orientation towards civic responsibility;
- Instructional techniques that create an effective learning environment including: learner-centered instruction, multiple intelligences, and relevant topics; and
- Well designed and easy to use materials.
(Taken from Environmental Education Materials: Guidelines for Excellence, published in 1998 by the North American Association for Environmental Education. Click Here for more information.)
by CLASSROOM EARTH