Tag: climate change

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There Is No Planet B: A Message from NYU’s Gallatin Global Design Professors – Part 1

This post is part of a series on the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP21) held in Paris, France, from 30 November to 12 December 2015. Part 2 can be found here. For the latest on the Gallatin professors’ initiatives, be sure to follow Global Design NYU on Twitter.

NYU’s Gallatin Professors Stake Out a New Initiative
Climate change effects pose drastic challenges to the architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design communities. The immediate response has been a turn toward a host of energy-saving technologies or behavior modifications. What has rarely been addressed, however, is the problem of scale. How can the designer ensure that global solutions do not come at the expense of local traditions, cultures, and environments? By placing human coherent, emotional, technological, and social needs at the center of our environmental concerns, we propose a new Global Design initiative.

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Climate Change and Disenfranchisement: A View from Fiji

This post is part of a series on the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP21) held in Paris, France, from 30 November to 12 December 2015.

“Right up here you’ll see the point they landed on.” I’m walking along a karst limestone ridge covered in luxurious vegetative growth. I’m in the village of Nagigi on the island of Vanua Levu in the Republic of Fiji, and my guide, Masivesi Madigibuli, is taking me to see the point of first landing for his people. As we walk, Masi points out a hidden cartography of the island. The undulations in the karst ridge are actually the foundations of former structures, and as we get on our hands and knees, we see giant shells—clam, snail, oyster—all dwarfing their modern relatives.

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Understanding the “Success” and “Failure” of COP21

This post is part of a series on the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP21) held in Paris, France, from 30 November to 12 December 2015.

How should we interpret the outcome of COP21 from Paris? Antonio Gramsci was fond of advising that one maintain “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” This seems to be the right mindset with which to receive the COP21 agreement. Much of the mainstream media reporting about the agreement betrays an astounding level of ignorance, laziness, and/or apathy regarding the subject. The easy storylines of a “breakthrough,” “game-changing,” or “landmark” agreement ignore the existing context in which the agreement took place. For decades, nation-states have placed cynical geopolitical strategy over the need to address an imminent unprecedented global environmental crisis resulting in maintenance of the status quo and the protection of entrenched economic interests regardless of the cost to the environment and humanity.

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Socio-Environmental Disasters and Resilience Approaches

In April 2015, the rains stopped coming to the New Guinea Highlands—a result of the current El Niño impacting the planet. A few months later in August, the inevitable frosts arrived that also accompany El Niños. What few crops were struggling to survive in people’s gardens were utterly decimated by the frosts, for while people garden in the highlands up to 2,800 meters above sea level, the crops they grow are mostly adapted to lowland tropical environments. The staples of the highlands—sweet potatoes (Ipomoea batatas) and taro (Colocasia esculenta)—cannot be stored; therefore, the inability to continually plant and harvest staple crops poses food insecurity for almost 2 million people in Papua New Guinea (PNG).

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The Environment and Military Conflict: A Critical Review of the Environmental Security Discourse in the Himalaya

Recently, wide-ranging claims have been made about the relationship between the environmental change in the Himalaya and Indian national security, providing space for a broader debate concerning the concept and practice of environmental security. It has been claimed in the environmental security discourse that the climate change and resource scarcity in Himalaya threaten national security of India and can possibly lead to violent conflict in the Indian subcontinent region. Such causal assumptions have profound implications in which the Himalaya and its environmental issues are likely to be understood and addressed in the future. The dominance of this discourse and the concomitant neglect of important social and political factors, which embody any environmental change in the Himalaya, make it crucial that the environment security paradigm be critically examined.

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Anthropology, the Anthropocene, and the Military

In recent months, the United States Department of Defense spoke out on climate change. While many seemed surprised that the DoD had quietly been thinking about and planning for the effects of climate, the US military’s concern for weather conditions and climate change is actually nothing new. Military strategy has always tried to take into account weather conditions and their impact on battlefield conditions, troop morale, logistics, and the ability to maneuver. What is interesting about the US military’s concern with climate change is that it has been seemingly at odds with the “official” position of many of its key governmental supporters. While members of Congress and the Senate and members of the conservative or anti-science chattering classes may continue to deny the reality of climate change or the role of human activity in bringing about a new geo/environmental era, the military has quietly gone about studying and planning for the impact of this new reality for decades. Two recent reports, the “2014 Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap” and the “Strategic Sustainability Performance Plan FY 2014,” detail the military’s thinking about climate change, how changing environmental conditions will impact its ability to carry out missions, and how the DoD will also create new forms of missions and operations stresses and challenges.

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