Computers, Society, and Nature

While this is no UN event, you guys should check out the following site: YC3. This conference is run by youth for youth and will be a chance for youth concerned about climate change to get together and generate action! There will be plenty of large group sessions, but also smaller workshops that will give participants the chance to come up with action plans for climate change awareness campaigns/events/etc in their communities. Notably, David Anderson (past minister of the Environment) and Elizabeth May (Executive Director of the Sierra Club of Canada) will be speaking and/or running workshops at the conference!

So while this conference will happen in British Columbia, in one building, this July – where everyone will be close enough to touc – there is still a huge amount of technology and computers being used in the logistics. For instance, the steering team is made up of members from many different locations in Canada – they have never all met or even talked on the phone… all steering committee meetings thus far have taken place with the help of MSN netmeeting! Email is very useful as well and the beautiful website is helping to attract delegates from different parts of the country and even different parts of the world! Go computers!

Check the site out! Maybe you or someone you know would want to participate!

I linked to this site in the last post, but I wanted to mention it again because it’s cool:

www.seeisbelieving.ca, publishing information about new technologies that can save the world

Some examples of pages on the site:

A clickable map that shows the impacts, good and bad of cell phones

GPS mapping: Risking lives

The battle over maps and names

The report I mentioned in an earlier post, The Death of Environmentalism, has made it into the NYTimes: Paper Sets Off a Debate on Environmentalism’s Future. These days the authors are receiving numerous speaking engagements. I’m sure that at the same the report’s become somewhat of a scourge of the left wing, it’s become a darling of the right wing.

The environmental movement is currently being shaken by a new report that asserts the Death of Environmentalism. Salon magazine has published an excellent review of the article and its reactions.

The report’s main complaint, according to the Salon article?

the environmental establishment’s current approach to fighting global warming is hopelessly wonky, mired in technical policy fixes, like raising CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) emission standards on cars or mandating cap-and-trade schemes on CO2-emitting power plants. The organizations suffer from pigheaded “policy literalism,” refusing to recognize that they’re in the middle of a culture war that won’t be won by “appealing to the rational consideration of our collective self-interest.”

What would save environmentalism? The report argues for a compelling inspiration vision to counteract the right and mobilize the vast numbers of people needed to enact national and global environmental change. This is quite ironic because my research is in the “technical policy fix” realm of geographic information systems and conservation, which has as its main selling point the “compelling” images and maps of environmental degradation. These images are supposed to assist in mobilizing people for change. My research can survive the critiques; after all, GIS will continue to be used for identifying endangered species and assigning protected areas for some time. However, it’s much more difficult for associations such as the Society for Conservation GIS to continue advocating for GIS and to obtain funding when its potential pots of money are hearing these arguments.

Of course less reliance on technocracy and policy wonkery could be rejuvinating to the movement. The US could do with someone like David Suzuki. On the other hand, these messianic types often come bundled with other agendas, like get rid of the foreigners, all technology is evil, etc.