"inconvenient truths" of mainstream representations of "climate change"

from the columbia journalism review:
http://www.cjr.org/the_observatory/five_inconvenient_truths.php?page=all

...gives some insight into the practice of journalism, especially for outsiders, and details five representational (or misrepresentational) tendencies of reportage on climate change.

CO2 scrubbing silos?

i love that their solution is to literally bury the problem: extract C02 from the atmosphere and pack it in the earth, under the oceans, or wherever.

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/06/23/scrubbing-the-atmosp.html

whatever works, i suppose, but man what a mess.

free documentaries, online

in case you don't have enough time on your hands:
http://freedocumentaries.org/

i'm guessing these aren't all mainstream fare, for all the benefits and ills this entails. there is a section on "environmental documentaries," for example, that runs the range between gmo foods to radioactive contamination. there may need to be a bit of scanning happening...

Paul Kingsnorth on Renewables in Apr. '08 Ecologist

thought a few might be interested in this (maybe CEO Hoicka most):

in the April 2008 issue of Ecologist, Paul Kingsnorth writes about the storm brewing in Lewis about a massive, 181 turbine wind farm. here are some highlights from the article.

The battle of Lewis [a contested site of a 181 turbine wind farm] is not the easily-told story of greens versus anti-green reactionaries. It is more complex, and more interesting, than that.
The question that hovers above it all is currently echoing around the world, and will only grow louder: in the fight against climate change, will the environment have to be destroyed to save the environment? Can the ends justify the means?
(26)

The amount of maize needed to fill the tank of a Range Rover with ethanol fuel would feed a person for a whole year. Fill your tank every two weeks for a year and you have taken enough food out of circulation to feed a hungry village.
(27)

Ironically, it now seems that biofuels don't even do what they were intended to: new research has revealed that, once the 'carbon cost' of clearing land for biofuels is taken into account, virtually every biofuel crop actually produces more emissions than the fuel it replaces.
(27)

The lesson to be learned from all this is a sobering one. Renewable energy technologies as we currently know them are incapable of providing anything like the amount of power we have come to expect from fossil fuels. Even if technologies improve, which they will undoubtedly do, they will not do so fast or cheaply enough to prevent the growing conflicts over land that the spread of large-scale renewables is already provoking.
...
[G]reen technologies can have a distinctly un-green downside. And green technologies – any technologies – on this sort of ['mega project'] scale are going to be undemocratic, top-down, unaccountable and, potentially, very destructive indeed.
Scale, in the end, is all.
(28)

interesting and highly relevant stuff, even if he may be a little more polemics than research.

CFP: Environment, Curriculum and Education

another one of interest, perhaps (oh, and no apparent deadline, since they want to publish it serially over the next few years?? not sure; here it is anyway):

The Journal of Curriculum Studies (JCS) welcomes submissions for a forthcoming special issue on "Environment, Curriculum and Education"

For full details please visit http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/cfp/tcuscfp1.pdf

Since the 1970s, the state of the environment and pathways toward sustainability have both emerged and been contested as onjects of political and pedagogic discourse in a range of institutions and places throughout the world. Often ties to shifts in and a broadening of ecological consciousness, it can also be noted that various attempts to "green" civil society and structures have led to mixed responses on the part of new social movements and formations, schools and communities, and business and governance, amongst others.

The Journal of Curriculum Studies seeks to publish a series of scholarly articles and essays on "Environmental, Curriculum and Education". Papers might address, but are not limited to, inquiries about:

- the politics and philosophy of the environment and / or sustainability in teaching, learning and the curriculum
- contemporary and possible purposes, expectations and policies shaping formal education systems
- the relationship between academic environmental and sustainability research and scholarship and the curriculum

To read the full Special Call for Submissions please visit http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/cfp/tcuscfp1.pdf

For more information and the Journal of Curriculum Studies, please visit www.informaworld.com/jcs

Submissions should be sent to Alan Reid, special editor for the "Education, Curriculum and Education" strand of Journal of Curriculum Studies.

Alan Reid is Editor of Environmental Education Research. Please visit www.informaworld.com/eer for more details.

CFP: for Environmental Communication

Looks like a good call for some of us—anyone interested in a collaborative venture??
-k

Call for Papers

Discursive constructions of climate change: practices of encoding and decoding

Call for manuscripts for special issue of
Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture
Volume #3, Issue #2 (2009)

Editors: Anabela Carvalho, University of Minho; Tarla Rai Peterson, Texas A&M University

One of the biggest challenges of the current century for governments, corporations and citizens alike, climate change has gained a high political, social and symbolic status worldwide. While global greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise and proposals for mitigation are faced with many forms of resistance, polls show widespread concern with the issue. Over the last couple of decades, climate change has in fact acquired a quasi-paradigmatic character, often standing for a diverse range of problems in the relation between humans and nature. It is, therefore, a central problem to environmental communication, and consequently to research in this discipline.

At the core of climate change are political, social and ethical choices with implications for the future of all peoples and all other species in the planet. The paths ahead, the available options and the decisions on the issue have been subjected to multiple discursive constructions and contestations by a number of social actors. Understanding how the meanings of climate change are constructed, reconstructed, and transformed, and shedding light on the relation between discourses, interpretations and social practices, are key goals for communication scholars.

We invite researchers worldwide who are working in the topic area of climate change to submit manuscripts that analyze the meanings of the issue in the discourses of various social actors and/or the media, or that discuss the connections between discursive and social representations of climate change.

How is climate change represented in discourses across the world in its scientific, political, economic and social dimensions? To what extent do discursive categories and language practices shape perceptions of the problem, public engagement and political action? What can rhetorical analysis contribute to further our understanding of political and civic communication on climate change? These are examples of the questions that may be addressed in this special issue of Environmental Communication.

We seek manuscripts that analyze historical contexts, material and economic conditions, institutional settings, political initiatives, practices of resistance, and/or the theoretical significance of discursive formations surrounding climate change. Essays will be selected to be academically sound, self-reflexive, intellectually innovative, and conceptually relevant to communication on climate change.

Manuscripts should be formatted in Microsoft Word in a PC-compatible version (Mac users, please utilize the most current versions of Word and end your file names in ".doc") and submitted electronically as attachments. E-mail messages to which manuscripts are attached should contain all authors' name and affiliations. They should indicate a corresponding author, and include name, affiliation, e-mail address, postal address, and voice and fax telephone numbers for that person. Manuscripts should include an abstract of 150 words or less, including a list of five suggested key words. Manuscripts should be prepared in 12-point font, should be double-spaced throughout, and should not exceed 8,000 words including references. The journal adheres to APA Style. Manuscripts must not be under review elsewhere or have appeared in any other published form. Upon notification of acceptance, authors must assign copyright to Taylor and Francis and provide copyright clearance for any copyrighted material. For further details on manuscript submission, please refer to the 'Instructions for authors' on the journal's website.

The journal is published in English, and manuscripts must be submitted in English. Because climate change is a global phenomenon and issue, we are prepared to provide additional editorial assistance for manuscripts that examine the topic in non-English speaking regions. Manuscripts should be emailed to carvalho@ics.uminho.pt or raipeterson@tamu.edu by 29 August 2008.

Please disseminate this CFP to any colleagues that might be interested.

--
***************************************************************
Dr. Daniel J. Paré, Associate Professor
Department of Communication
University of Ottawa
554 King Edward Ave.,
Ottawa, Ontario, K1N 6N5, Canada
Tel: (613) 562-5800 ext: 2052
Fax: (613) 562-5240
***************************************************************

infed.org - informal education

more about sharing links for Matt:
http://www.infed.org/

...this one's a site about informal and, in particular, experiential education--the latter of which is a key part of the tradition in environmental education.

they're also asking for contributions, in an online format, so if you have any ideas... check out their homepage

Canadian Network for Environmental Education and Communication

I came across the Canadian Network for Environmental Education and Communication (EECOM) which describes themselves as:

"Canada’s only, national, bilingual, network for environmental education and communication. We are a membership-based, charitable organization that is multi-disciplinary, multi-regional, multi-cultural and multi-sectoral. We work with provincial groups and multiple sectors to support and develop competency in educators, communicators, learners and consumers, and build capacity for environmental learning and sustainability."

It fits very well with Matt's interests, although they don't sound overly academic. A good and a bad thing, I suppose. They have a conference coming up on September, Sarah Harmer is a keynote speaker too?!

i missed the deadline!!

maybe i had subconscious fears of political disruptions, but i procrastinated (or alternately, blame my office for too much work) on the isee in nairobi conference, and was so tired tonight but debated getting it in by midnight on the deadline. however, the secretariat is in new zealand and is *closed*, so i missed it, even though i wasn't planning to go anyways, i really wanted to go through the process.

maybe i am lucky this week, i searched for a bit and found this list, and i *am* carefully debating hooking up with friends in thailand in august, and what do you know? there is an energy security and climate change conference in bangkok right after i plan on landing there, with academics from all over, including UBC and Toronto, so maybe my vacation will include improving my academic credentials as well. and maybe there is even something relevant closer to home, but i doubt it--sadly, i think everything in canada is about the tar sands these days, and i think my masters work actually is more likely to be employed in a country facing real scarcity.

Visualizing Information for Advocacy by the Tactical Technology Collective

i'm totally psyched about browsing/reading this:
http://www.tacticaltech.org/infodesign

Modern life is saturated with ever increasing amounts of information, advertising and media with little time to digest what is being said. Against this background, NGOs and advocates too often find the information they want to communicate, either buried in long reports full of professional jargon and statistics, or overlooked in an endless stream of media releases. Whether communicating to the public, staff, donors or government officials, information design can help NGOs communicate with more impact, increase accessibility, and present issues powerfully.

Visualizing Information for Advocacy: An Introduction to Information Design is a manual aimed at helping NGOs and advocates strengthen their campaigns and projects through communicating vital information with greater impact. This project aims to raise awareness, introduce concepts, and promote good practice in information design – a powerful tool for advocacy, outreach, research, organization and education.

from what i can gather, Tactical Technology Collective is an international group, with members based (and funding received from organizations based) all over the world.

"Can I Have a Say in Our Future?" Forum

"Can I Have a Say in Our Future?" Forum
Sounds right up some of our alleys...

Speakers include Tony Clarke, Peter Victor, Bill Vanderberg, Eduardo Sousa, Jocelyn Thorpe, and Lois Wilson

Fri. Feb. 29, 1-5pm, in the OISE auditorium (ground floor?)

http://scienceforpeace.sa.utoronto.ca/forum-08
for more info...

CFP: Race, Environment, and Representation - Deadline Apr. 15

“Race, Environment, and Representation”
Special issue of: Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture

Originally posted on H-Net: http://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=160956

This special issue of Discourse will present interdisciplinary scholarship that examines the intersection of the environment, race, and representational practices. It aims to redress the lack of conversation between critical race studies, ecocriticism, and media studies. This important conversation can be more fully opened by exploring some of the following questions: How are environment and race both, in the terms of Lawrence Buell, mutually constructed, shaped by the material world and the world of discourse? How does the concept of “environment” inform the work of ethnic authors who are often concerned with urban, industrial, and agricultural landscapes overlooked or shunned by conservation-oriented environmentalists? How have artists and critics responded to the emergence of a more socially oriented discourse and practice of environmental justice? What aesthetic forms and strategies can represent the burdens of pollution, health, and structural violence that are inflicted upon different groups, often with effects that seem invisible, temporally remote, or geographically removed?

We invite essays from a broad a range of scholars and methodologies on topics such as ethnic studies, cultural geography, visual culture, urban history, philosophy, literary criticism, American studies, environmental history, and anthropology. In bringing together diverse approaches to the problems posed by race, environmental justice, and cultural mediation, the issue will explore how attending to the uneven distribution of environmental burdens might enable political coalitions and aesthetic practices that move beyond, without leaving behind, local struggles and the politics of identity that have characterized many aspects of both environmentalism and antiracist discourses.

We understand the key terms of our title – race, environment, and representation – broadly. With respect to race we are interested in extending the critical conversation about the environment to more fully address how historically sedimented racial groups—including whites—intersect with issues of location (i.e., in environmentally impacted, disinvested urban areas or in overseas regions affected by toxic dumping) and access (i.e., to health care, education, and pesticide-free products). By environment we mean not only places commonly represented as “natural” and “wild” – thus the usual targets of environmentalism – but also cities, suburbs, and working landscapes. While we are convinced by poststructuralist arguments that understandings of nature are always matters of representation and not merely scientific fact, we are especially interested in how particular representational practices mediate experiences of nature and the environment.

Possible topics might include, but should by no means by limited to:
--visual representations of intangible, invisible environmental “body burdens”
--the racial politics of urban/suburban design
--how media have been mobilized to create translocal imagined communities among differently situated grassroots activists (and even across species lines)
--intersections between environmental justice and emerging scholarship on biopower, or, in Nikolas Rose’s phrase, “the politics of life itself”
--social aspects of environmental art or earthworks
--intersections of religion, environmentalism, and race
--Review essays on books such as The Environmental Justice Reader (ed. Adamson, Evans, and Stein); Race, Nature, and the Politics of Difference (ed. Moore, Pandian, and Kosek); The Quest for Environmental Justice (Bullard); Noxious New York (Sze); and The Future of Environmental Criticism (Buell).

Articles should be a maximum of 7,500 words in length, and formatted in Chicago style. Interested contributors please send an abstract (max. of 500 words) by 15 April 2008. The deadline for receipt of articles will be 15 July 2008. We welcome any questions. Please email all materials and queries to Discourse Guest Editors, Mark Feldman (markfeld@stanford.edu) and Hsuan L. Hsu (hsuan.hsu@yale.edu).