2015 Conference

Full Presentation Panel

Phenology - A Mindful Approach to Climate Change

Dr Mark L Hineline, Ph.D.

For decades now, concern about anthropogenic climate change (ACC) has been primarily the domain of scientists, in research and in public interest outreach, of environmentalists, and as a political football in the United States. While there have been and continue to be other aspects of ACC, the one area that has been little explored is the impact it will have on individual lives, here in the United States and elsewhere. This is unfortunate, inasmuch as climate change, and the climatic changes that issue therefrom, promise to be the defining issues in the lifetimes of all people alive today, and many who are not yet born – defining in the sense, say, that plague defined the 14th Century or that expanding literacy defined the 17th Century.

Climate change - and climatic changes - are a fact of life, and will continue to be so for decades to come. While it is more important than it has ever been to develop policies designed to prevent catastrophic consequences from ACC, it is also important to think and talk about how to live with this fact of life. One way to do this is to develop an observational and contemplative approach to climatic changes through the practice of phenological observing and record keeping.

The proposer is currently at work on a handbook for citizen-observers across a spectrum of levels of commitment, with the idea that attending to phenological signposts, recording them, and reflecting upon them, is an appropriate (but far from complete) response to climate change. This presentation will be a brief abstract of my forthcoming work, The Dooryard Phenologist: Noting Climatic Changes through the Seasons.

Building an Ecosystemic Model of Culture: Consequences for Public Policies, Research and Teaching Programmes

André Francisco Pilon

The contemporary world is increasingly dependent upon very large, intertwined and interdependent complex interacting systems, which legitimize power as domination and exploitation, wealth as predatory exploitation, growth as unlimited expansion, work as a segmented specialization. In view of the asymmetries of power between citizens and corporations and the dominant political-technological-economical system controlled by egocentric producers and consumers, critical thinking, interdisciplinary and holistic, values driven approaches are needed.

To deal with the problems of difficult settlement or solution in the world, an ecosystemic approach is posited for public policies, research and teaching programmes, encompassing four dimensions of being in the world (intimate, interactive, social and biophysical), as they combine, as donors and recipients, to induce the events (deficits and assets), cope with consequences (desired or undesired) and contribute for change (potential outputs), as long as they preserve their singularity (identity, proper characteristics) and dynamic reciprocity (mutual support).

Problems are defined within the “boiling pot”, where they originate, and not reduced to the bubbles of the surface (effects, fragmented, taken for granted issues); deficits and assets of all the dimensions are considered in the origin of the events, in order to strengthen their connections and seal their ruptures; since all dimensions are complementary in a mutually entangled web (configurations), that should be in a dynamic equilibrium, in view of natural and built environments and physical, social and mental wellbeing.

In the socio-cultural learning niches, projects of life are unveiled and dealt with by heuristic-hermeneutic processes, contributions of the participants are analysed from a thematic (“what”) and an epistemic point of view (“how”) in different space-time horizons of understanding, feeling and action; new forms of interpretation and understanding prepare the transition to an ecosystemic model of culture, integrating politics, economics, culture, education, environment, health, ethics and overall quality of life.

Perspectives on Planetary Boundaries: A Framework of Safe Operating Space for Humanity in a Changing Planet

Mohammed F.Rabbi, Professor of Life Sciences and Environmental Science

In the last 200 years, the dominant force for change in the earth system, i.e., the Earth’s climate and ecosystems embodies the human factor, and humanity has transitioned into a new planetary epoch, the Anthropocene. This new geologic era is characterized by an accelerating departure from the stable environmental conditions of the past 12,000 years into a new, unknown state of the Earth. There are increasing concerns that due to exponential growth of the anthropogenic activities, biophysical systems that are critical for regulating the stability of the Earth system could be destabilized and approach “tipping points” for unacceptable global environmental changes and that might trigger catastrophic events for human well-being.

A novel approach towards global sustainability has recently been proposed as “Planetary boundaries” with respect to the functioning of the Earth system and to explore frameworks of a safe operating space for human activities. In this novel concept, “unacceptable global environmental changes” are defined as the risks humanity faces in relation to the planetary transition from the stable environment of the Holocene era to the present geologic era of Anthropocene. This novel concept of planetary boundaries can transform our approach to growth and addresses the challenges of how to determine “safe boundaries” for humanity, based on the Earth systems and to operate within them.

The concept of planetary boundaries emphasizes the Earth as a complex system. In order to maintain a global environment that is advantageous for human development and well-being, Earth-system processes or well-defined areas of planetary boundaries as well as those that humanity has already transgressed are described in this presentation.  

Archives of Knowledge and Endangered Objects in the Anthropocene : Amy Balkin’s “A People’s Archive of Sinking and Melting”

Lisa E Bloom, Ph.D.

This article focuses on environmental work by artists that attempts to visually address new forms of art, seeing, feeling and sociality that are coming into being in the age of the Anthropocene.  It asks, in what ways can art portray what Rob Nixon calls in his book “Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor” “the violence of delayed effects”? (Nixon 2011: 2-3) How might it do so in a way that goes beyond the socio-political phenomena in question to address the emotional disturbance of living amidst these delayed effects? The work of Amy Balkin’s “A People’s Archive of Sinking and Melting” is an archive literally of “debris” – the things that are already left or will be abandoned in the wake of environmental destruction. The collection contains objects from the Arctic and Antarctic as well as other parts of the world like Mexico City that one doesn’t think of as sinking and melting.  The focus of Balkin’s work is  how to represent environmental damage yet to come, a task that has often been delegated to the realm of science fiction writers often with powerful results. Balkin complicates in her work this notion of the future through rethinking the genre of the post-apocalyptic .Her project’s particular focus is on the slow-motion violence of climate change often discounted by dominant structures of perception but one that is relayed by ordinary people around the world who as non-experts or non-scientists are often not seen as authoritative witnesses. In this conceptual work, emphasis is put on documenting, analyzing and archiving everyday occurrences often dismissed from memory and policy planning by framing them as accidental, or random. The archive focuses on the inequitable exposure to climate –related losses for diverse communities and is displayed at libraries, galleries and online.