Climate Reality Project Leadership Corps
I invite you all to join me in my climate reality projects.
I have just completed the training course to become a leader for Vice President Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project. This provides me with a tremendous set of resources for educating students of all ages about the challenges of Climate Change and the ways we can meet these challenges. I invite all of you to join me in participating in my mentorship project and my archaeological project to educate all those interested in the realities of Climate Change and what we can do about it.
VP Gore summarizes the Realities of Global Warming.
Why must we learn about climate change? Because the planet is nearing the maximum average temperature for sustaining life as we know it.
How can we mitigate global warming? By using existing the technologies of renewable energy, conservation and the social strategies of empowering of women and decentralizing energy production for poor communities in order to increase food and energy production and efficiency for everyone.
Can we get this done by 2050. Yes, if we continue to collaborate as a planet through climate accords to set a pathway and listen to the younger generations who have been living within the world of internet technology and climate change for their entire lives. “My Climate Story” sets out my story as an environmentalist as a first installment of blogs, presentations and zoom panels that I intend to create to forward the Climate Reality Agenda.
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My climate story goes back to the first earth day in 1970, which I attended as undergraduate anthropology student at Stony Brook University. My ecological interest was peaked by a curriculum that focussed on the study of how human communities culturally adapt to the diverse set of this planet’s natural environments. I had the privilege of learning from professors who had studied cultures from Borneo to the US and other other professors who were among the first to tackle the problems of human ecology. I recall lectures by Prof. Roger Peranio who described how kinship and family underlay the adaptation of farmers from Borneo; by Prof Louis Faron who was a leading thinker on cultural ecological theory; and Prof. Lawrence Slobodkin about the population dynamics of all biological communities including humans. I was even privileged to hear from Prof. James Watson the discoverer of DNA with Frances Crick. All of this inspired me to study human society through the eyes of the anthropologist, the biologist and the methodology of science.
My undergraduate career was capped off by a commencement speech by the first director of the newly created Environmental Protection Agency. President Richard Nixon, following the lead of President Teddy Roosevelt, acknowledged the fundamental need to conserve the natural environment. Ironically, this was the same corrupt, war-mongering Nixon who I had spent a good part of my college life protesting. But no Nixon, no EPA. Russell Train, the EPA’s first director spoke somewhat boringly but nonetheless profoundly about the need for citizens to care for the environment. Politics indeeds creates strange bedfellows.
My subsequent archaeological education focussed on the relationship between human communities and their natural environments. My dissertation research was my first original foray into human ecology. I travelled to Copenhagen to begin a study of the ecological impact of the first farmers in Denmark on the forests of 7000 years ago. I investigated this human-ecological dynamic between farmers and forest through both theoretical computer simulation and the empirical paleoenvironmental history of Danish forests surrounding the archaeological sites of Neolithic Farmers. The computer model predicted the impact of farming under agro-ecological scenarios ranging from slash and burn farmers who burned a forest patch, planted it and let it re-grow, to more intensive farmers who continuously planted fields surrounding their villages. The parameters for these simulations were derived from the ecological and demographic studies of forest succession by leading population ecologists like Likens, Boorman and Horn.
My empirical study of the archaeological and paleoenvironmental study of Danish forests started with learning about pollen identification (via many hours over a microscope) and participating in bog excavations to collect archaeological evidence and stratigraphic pollen cores. I then statistically analyzed the pollen counts in the layers of these cores to look for patterns of forest succession and farming. In simple terms, through tby counting the numbers of pollen grains from tree, weed and grass species, I was able to ‘see’ the decline of primary the oak forest in the vicinity of prehistoric farming communities and the patterns of succession after such clearing. For example, an increase in the pollen of ‘weeds’ such as plantain (Plantago lanceolata) and decrease in Oak pollen indicated forest clearance. This was usually associated with the appearance of the pollen of barley, wheat and rye grasses. If these fields were left to regrow as in slash and burn agriculture, fast growing trees such as willow, hazel and birch, would succeed the farming episode and eventually yield to the high topped dominance of oak, linden, and maple. If the fields were farmed intensively, no such forest succession occurred. All of these patterns leave their traces in the numbers of pollen grains left in the peat bogs.
I have since applied my I research interests to my archaeological teaching of university students in the southeast and northeast US as well as Ireland. Archaeology to me has always been relevant to solving modern ecological problems because there is, in my opinion, nothing more powerful than our understanding of the past to cope with the present and plan for the future. But it was not until around 1980 when I saw the direct connection between archaeology and climate change, by attending a 3 day workshop by Dr Amory Lovins sponsored by the National Science Foundation/Chautauqua Institute. Lovins led the way for understanding how alternative energy and conservation were the answers to the slowly emerging recognition that we could not continue to keep up with a fossil fuel based economy without destroying the planet. And more than this, he showed the economic benefits of what he called “soft energy paths” and energy conservation.
I have since taught all of my courses from an human ecological perspective. I have had the privilege of teaching 1000’s of undergraduates and 100’s of graduate students over the past 4 decades and the thing I am most proud of is helping them understand how the health of human communities natural environments. This cultural ecological relationship changed qualitatively when we as a species t we shifted collecting our food from gathering, hunting and fishing to planting, cultivating and planting our food through farming. Everything we are currently doing to our planet is the result of this dramatic and traumatic change, which from the start effected challenging consequences in human health, ecology and human economics. Put simply, we transitioned from being “a part of nature” to being apart from nature.
Flash forward to today. Having just this past June retired from teaching, I am commiting my professional expertise, experience and hopefully wisdom to two major culture-environmental, climate change projects. First, I am co-directing a major eco-heritage economic development plan in southeastern Ireland and western Wales. The research goal of which is to understand the environmental and cultural history of the first settlers of this region, who arrived shortly after the most recent glaciers receded some 10-12,000 years ago. This archaeological and paleoenvironmental understanding lays the foundation for creating this region as a eco-heritage educational tourist destination. I invite professionals, students, and everyone who wants to participate in this project to contact me.
My second professional endeavor is working as a mentor of students and young people on how to build Green-Careers. Being a Leader in the Climate Reality Project allows me to join my experience, expertise and love of mentoring students to help promote a Green Future. Using my organization Out of the Box Education Solutions (www.outoftheboxeducation.org) as a platform, I am planning on connecting students with career advisors who are knowledgeable about the Green Economy and corporations, NGO’s, state agencies and education who are seeking employees skilled in the Green technology and knowledge. Please contact me if you want to be a mentor, an advisor, or a mentee?
see www.outoftheboxeducation.org for my complete CV, resume, my blogs, samples of my interviews, podcast and even my Ted Talk on the history of baseball (my research avocation!).