Latest Articles by Kate Cheney Davidson

Students put global warming in the spotlight

Kate Cheney Davidson — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 10:30:00 +0000

A campaign to galvanise students and policy-makers in the US is reminiscent of demonstrations in the 1960s. Kate Cheney Davidson reports on the educational effort dubbed “Earth Day for the climate”.

Photo: Emily Todd

Not many people get excited about seeing a lump of coal, but Professor Wendy Anderson can hardly contain herself.

Standing on a grassy strip at Drury University in Springfield, Missouri, Anderson, a biology professor, waits impatiently for her delivery of seven tonnes of coal. The “coal dump,” as she calls it will kick off a day of intense discussion on energy conservation and global warming at the school. It takes seven tonnes of coal each day to power Drury’s main campus for three hours.

Across the country on over 1,500 university campuses, as well as high schools, faith-based organisations and civic groups, people will gather to discuss climate change and related topics as a part of “Focus the Nation” day. Organisers are calling it the largest teach-in in American history, with thousands of students, over 40 members of Congress and hundreds of state-elected officials taking part.

Teach-ins started in the United States as a type of non-violent protest against the Vietnam War. In 1965, a group of professors at the University of Michigan decided to use their classrooms as a platform to discuss the moral arguments against US involvement in Vietnam. Despite intense resistance by the school administration, and a bomb scare, the teach-in was successful and became a popular form of protest across the country.

Eban Goodstein, a professor of economics at Lewis and Clark College in Oregon, and founder of Focus the Nation, seized on the idea of a nationwide teach-in as a way to engage students and political leaders on global warming. Although similar to other single day events like Step It Up and the Live Earth concerts, Goodstein stresses that this event is more educationally focused.

“What’s different about Focus the Nation is that we’re more institutionally based. It’s not just a bunch of activists organising rallies, but rather educational engagement.”

Bill Barnes, a professor of economics and environmental studies at the University of Portland in Oregon, helped organise his school’s teach-in, which involves 24 different sessions on topics ranging from climate science to the politics of global climate-change agreements. According to Barnes, this type of intellectual exchange doesn’t just happen on a regular basis.

“You would think that academics cooperate, but they don’t. You miss the big-picture problems when that happens,” Barnes said.

Students need the big picture, argues Barnes, to understand the complexity of climate change and what it will take to fight it.

“They don’t understand at 18 what’s happening. It’s not on their TV. Reading the newspaper is not something they do.”

At Missouri State University, biology professor Alexander Wait gave a talk at his campus entitled, “Birds, Bees, Beer and Other Reasons to Care About Climate Change.” Faced with a worldwide shortage of hops, Wait is hoping that a future without beer will spur college-aged kids to act.

But some students do “get it” when it comes to climate change. Lacey Riddle, a senior Environmental Ethics and Policy major at the University of Portland, says her generation is ready to take a stand on the issue.

“We might have been a little too quiet for a little too long, but that’s okay. We don’t have to sit back and let it happen,” she said.

As a part of the daylong event, Focus the Nation is also connecting students to their elected officials in a variety of ways, from face-to-face meetings to video conferencing.

Riddle admits that there is a large amount of frustration and disappointment among her peers about the lack of political leadership on the issue.

“It’s really a disgrace that we’ve waited so long. The science has been around since at least the 70s,” Riddle said. “Now the time has come to tell them how we feel.”

Like many in her age group, Riddle is in favor of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, because, she says, his policy on global warming is so much stronger than Hillary Clinton’s.

Organisers insist their event is non-partisan, but recognise the issue of global warming is highly political. Which is why, they say, they chose to hold it in the midst of a presidential primary season, a time when top political leaders are most attuned to voters’ concerns.

Professor Barnes, who also serves on the Focus the Nation board of advisors, says they hope to make it an annual event that will culminate in a national policy on climate change.

“It’s going to become the equivalent of Earth Day, but for the climate.”

The event has already attracted international attention from countries like France and Canada who want to hold their own Focus the Nation day. But so far, says project director Goodstein, there is no word from China. He’s not surprised.

“America has the moral obligation to go first. We’ve been [contributing greenhouse-gas emissions] for much longer. Until America leads, it’s going to be very difficult for the Chinese to mobilise their own society to take up this challenge.”

Kate Cheney Davidson is US editor of chinadialogue

Homepage photo by Luke Redmond

Writer in the spotlight: Alan Weisman

Kate Cheney Davidson — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 10:06:00 +0000

Envisioning a post-human planet healing itself, The World Without Us is “an experiment in thinking”. Its author tells Kate Cheney Davidson how the book evolved – and hails a “courageous” China.

Alan Weisman’s environmental reporting has taken him to the farthest corners of the earth. From Amazon rainforests to the Korean demilitarized zone to New York City’s vast underground rail system, the American journalist has gone in search of places where humans have had their greatest, and their least, impact on the natural world. In his latest book, The World Without Us, Weisman travels to where no one has gone before – to an imagined time when the earth, suddenly rid of humankind, begins to heal itself.

The bestseller, which has now been translated into 30 languages, including Chinese, has been called one of the most provocative “thought experiments” of our time. chinadialogue’s Kate Cheney Davidson caught up with Weisman to talk about the genesis of The World Without Us and what it says ultimately about our human condition.

Kate Cheney Davidson: Why this book and why now?

Alan Weisman: I got a call from a Discover magazine editor in July of 2003. She wanted me to explore the idea of what would happen if we just left, you know, like now. Tomorrow, we’re all gone. Would nature bounce back without us there anymore? Once I got beyond the theoretical possibility, then I realised that this could provide us a really fresh perspective on the world. It would be a new way of looking at things from the other direction rather than worrying about how we can undo everything.

KCD: So the magazine article obviously evolved into a book-length project. How did you know that people would be interested in a book that is largely not even about them?

AW: The initial reaction from people when I told them I was working on a book about what the earth would look like without people was, “God, wouldn’t that be great?!” That was really interesting to me. It made me wonder what was going on here. Do we all miss the Garden of Eden on some level? Is this just some fantasy we have? Or is there really something to it? Suddenly I realised that what I had here was something so fascinating on lots of levels, but also there’s something in us that just loves to watch things break down.

KCD: Why do you think that is?

AW: I think there might be a few different mechanisms operating at once. Part of it is this animal inside of our nature in which we miss a beautiful, natural world that isn’t cluttered with all this stuff, and we kind of take great glee in watching nature eat it all up. There’s a novel by AM Homes called Music for Torching. At the very beginning of the book, you meet this totally stressed-out suburban family and they accidentally do something that could set the house on fire, something that they could have easily put out. But then they just sort of look at each other, and despite the fact that they are in the midst of this seething argument, they look at each other and look at the flames and they sort of smile and walk away. As if to say, ah, just let it go.

I’ve had people say similar things to me about my book, especially the chapter about how the walls of your house, or the walls around our entire culture like the city of New York would fall apart without us there to hold them up. Lots of people said to me that they had so much fun reading that chapter.

KCD: How has the experience of writing this book made you think differently about things like global warming?

AW: I think about global warming in the same way. Climate change is always occurring on earth, but this one [the change since the Industrial Revolution] is pretty clearly traceable to our activities because it’s easily documented how much carbon we’ve thrown into the atmosphere and the correlation between rising temperatures and the amount of carbon and other greenhouse gases that we have created.

As a kid, I was fascinated by paleontology and I’m okay with the earth being in a state of constant flux. What I’m not okay with is my species being out of control. So my feelings about global warming haven’t changed. They’ve been reinforced. I haven’t run into anything that would cause me to be less concerned.

KCD: After writing this book, do you think the situation is hopeless?

AW: My feeling about hope, or about being encouraged by what’s going to happen to nature, actually did go through a change and went through a change for the better. I’ve been really depressed about the environmental destruction I’ve seen, and I’ve thought about it in terms of the world coming to an end. That’s a very anthropocentric point of view. It may be the earth as we know it coming to an end and -- sadly enough, because of our own activities -- it may mean the end of my [human] race, but life is not coming to an end. I’ve seen continual examples during my research for this book of how amazingly indomitable life is.

KCD: Okay, so the earth will survive us. But are we, the human race, a lost cause?

AW: I’m just not ready to give up on us. I would like to think that human life will go on and that’s really why I wrote this book. It’s called The World Without Us, but I really want us to look hard at what’s going on, understand the totality of our impact. I didn’t want this book to be a polemic, but rather to show people stuff and let them make their own conclusions. But at the end, I pose this other fantasy: suppose that maybe we do keep living, but we only produce one child per family?

KCD: That’s long been the policy in China, but the idea is still very unpopular in your country, the United States. What reaction have you received from readers there?

AW: Mixed. Some of the reaction has been appreciative, but then Rush Limbaugh [a conservative American radio talk-show host] damned me to hell on his show.

KCD: How do you think, or hope, your book will be received in China? A country whose population, as you say in your book, is still one of the most active “breeders” on the planet? A country, by the way, that does not see itself as the ones who started the global environmental problems we face today.

AW: They’re not the ones who started the mess. However, by proliferating to the point that they have, they are definitely a world leader in increasing the population. They’ve also been a world leader in trying to do something about it. I think that the Chinese experiment [the one-child policy] was very courageous, and very, very difficult to try and implement and it showed us a lot of the pitfalls. But that is what experiments are supposed to do.

I hope that the Chinese are honored for having created an experiment that did point out a lot of the problems that we would have to overcome, and I hope that we will consider that experiment again. It’s just like at the beginning, everyone down-played the issues about global warming and didn’t want to face it, but now we’ve come around to realising that we have to face it. I think that the Chinese were pioneers, just like Al Gore was a pioneer, in talking about global warming.

KCD: Are you really a proponent of the world adopting a one-child-per-family policy?

AW: This book is an experiment in thinking. Even the overpopulation thing, or the one child per family. I’m not comfortable with that at all. Not only do I love my sister, but I’m a second born so I wouldn’t even be here. But we’re facing uncomfortable choices. The idea that we can green ourselves back into existence by eating forest-friendly foods or something is ridiculous. We can’t consume ourselves into sustainability. We have to lower consumption. That means we either consume things over and over again by recycling, or we consume fewer things. There are limits to how far growth can take you.

Alan Weisman is an American journalist, author, documentary-maker and educator.

Kate Cheney Davidson is a San Francisco-based journalist and US editor of chinadialogue.

Homepage photo by rogiro